Early detection of Alzheimer’s possible through algorithm
A team of scientists from Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has developed a software-based method of scanning electronic health records (EHRs) to estimate the risk that a healthy person will receive a dementia diagnosis in the future. Their algorithm uses machine learning to first build a list of key clinical terms associated with cognitive symptoms identified by clinical experts, then uses natural language processing (NLP) to comb through EHRs looking for those terms. Finally, the algorithm uses those results to estimate patients’ risk of developing dementia. “The most exciting thing is that we are able to predict risk of new dementia diagnosis up to eight years in advance,” said Thomas McCoy Jr., first author of the paper. The team included members of MGH’s Center for Quantitative Health, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. Their paper was published this week in Alzheimer’s & Dementia. The study included data...