A artificial intelligence(AI) could detect faster Parkinson’s disease. The London-based company Medopad, a company that develops health applications, has teamed up with the Chinese laboratory Tencent, which specializes in artificial intelligence, to design a technology capable of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease. The smart system, still in the works, is equipped with a camera that records how patients move their hands to determine symptoms and their severity. The research team collaborated with King’s College hospital in London to test the system based on videos of patients with this neurodegenerative disease. “We use AI to measure [l’évolution de la maladie] patients (…) without wearing sensors or devices”, explains to the bbc Dr. Wei Fan, Head of AI Lab at Tencent Medical.
The ultimate goal with this project is to accelerate the evaluation of patients’ motor skills. While this usually takes half an hour, with AI the diagnosis could be less than three minutes. No need to go to the hospital for patients, the test could be done at home via a smartphone application, foresee the designers of the project.
A diagnosis of motor symptoms
The clinical diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease is based on three motor symptoms, which do not necessarily appear at the same time, and often occur asymmetrically at varying intensity, recalls Inserm : slowness in initiating movements (akinesia), excessive rigidity of the muscles and tremors at restespecially in the hands and arms.
In France, 100,000 people are affected by this progressive diseasewhich results in an inability to walk and Autonomy loss.
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