TOKYO: An artificial intelligence tool that can detect tiny, hard-to-spot brain malformations in children with epilepsy could help patients access life-changing surgery quicker, Australian researchers said on Wednesday.
It is the latest example of how AI, which can crunch vast amounts of data, is changing health care by assisting doctors with diagnoses.
Epilepsy has several different causes, and overall around three in 10 cases are down to structural abnormalities in the brain, experts say.
These are often missed on MRI scans — especially the smallest lesions, sometimes hidden at the bottom of a brain fold.
A team led by Emma Macdonald-Laurs, a paediatric neurologist at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, trained an AI tool on child brain images to find lesions the size of a blueberry or smaller.
“They’re frequently missed and many children are not considered as surgical candidates,” Macdonald-Laurs told a briefing ahead of the publication of her team’s study in the journal Epilepsia.
“The tool doesn’t replace radiologists or epilepsy doctors, but it’s like a detective that helps us put the puzzle pieces together quicker so we can offer potentially life-changing surgery,” she said.
Of the patients who took part, with conditions known as cortical dysplasia and focal epilepsy, 80 percent had previously had an MRI scan come back as normal.
When the researchers used the AI tool to analyze both MRI and another type of medical scan called a PET, its success rate was 94 percent for one test group and 91 percent for another.
Out of 17 children in the first group, 12 had surgery to remove their brain lesions, and 11 are now seizure-free, said Macdonald-Laurs’s team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.
“Our next plans are to test this detector in more real-life hospital settings on new undiagnosed patients,” she said.
Epilepsy, which causes recurrent seizures, affects about one in 200 children, and about a third of cases are drug-resistent.
“This work is really exciting” as a proof of concept and the results are “really impressive,” Konrad Wagstyl, a biomedical computing expert at King’s College London (KCL), told AFP.
Similar research published in February by a KCL team using AI on MRI data spotted 64 percent of epilepsy-linked brain lesions that were missed by radiologists.
The Australian researchers used MRI with PET, “but some caveats are that PET is expensive, it’s not as widely available as MRI, and there is a dose of radiation like a CT scan or an X-ray associated with it,” Wagstyl noted.
AI tool helps researchers treat child epilepsy
https://arab.news/b9zek
AI tool helps researchers treat child epilepsy
- Epilepsy has several different causes, and overall around three in 10 cases are down to structural abnormalities in the brain, experts say
- These are often missed on MRI scans — especially the smallest lesions, sometimes hidden at the bottom of a brain fold
Changes to US security strategy ‘largely consistent’ with Russia’s vision: Kremlin
- Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the current US administration was “fundamentally different from the previous ones”
MOSCOW: Russia has welcomed changes in the US National Security Strategy, saying the adjustments that marked a radical departure from Washington’s previous policy were “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision.
Washington’s new National Security Strategy, published early Friday, took aim at allies in Europe, calling it over-regulated, lacking in “self-confidence” and facing “civilizational erasure” due to immigration.
The document stated that the United States would also prevent other powers from dominating but added: “This does not mean wasting blood and treasure to curtail the influence of all the world’s great and middle powers.”
Commenting on the new US strategy, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the current US administration was “fundamentally different from the previous ones.”
“The adjustments we’re seeing, I would say, are largely consistent with our vision,” Peskov said in an interview with state TV station Rossiya aired Sunday.
“President Trump is currently strong in terms of domestic political positions. And this gives him the opportunity to adjust the concept to suit his vision,” Peskov added.
The publication of the updated security strategy came as officials from Kyiv held talks in Florida with Trump’s envoys on the US-drafted plan to end the near four-year war in Ukraine.
Three days of talks produced no apparent breakthrough.
President Volodymyr Zelensky committed to further negotiations toward “real peace,” as Russia in the early hours of Saturday launched another series of drone and missile strikes at Ukraine.
Zelensky is due to meet with European leaders — French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — in London on Monday to take stock of the negotiations.
