Israeli chatbot could diagnose early Alzheimer’s disease

‘Clara,’ still in testing stages, works on a new understanding that Alzheimer’s affects the brain’s orientation system before affecting memory.

ISRAEL21c

Health and Medicine | Comments | October 2, 2019

A man in Brazil tests the Israeli Clara chatbot for early Alzheimer diagnosis. Photo: courtesy

Hundreds of drugs have been developed to address Alzheimer’s disease, says Dr. Shahar Arzy, director of the computational neuropsychiatry lab at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. “Do you know how many have been found effective? Zero.” But if patients could be diagnosed in the preclinical stages of the disease, perhaps some of the new biological medications showing excellent results in other domains of neurology could be effective when applied early enough in the course of Alzheimer’s disease.

Arzy and his colleagues have developed a computer-based system to ferret out early signs of Alzheimer’s. The system, dubbed Clara (“a hint towards ‘clarity of mind,’” Arzy says), is an artificial intelligence-based chatbot that asks patients questions about themselves and their relationships to people, places and events. Clara then uses machine learning to compare that information to a baseline in order to generate a computer-based test tailored for the specific individual that can diagnose very early Alzheimer’s. Arzy’s team published research results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in the American Psychological Association’s journal Neuropsychology showing the method to be 95 percent accurate. -- More...

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ISRAEL21c——Bio and Archives

ISRAEL21c was founded in 2001, in the wake of the Second Intifada, to broaden public understanding of Israel beyond typical portrayals in the mainstream media.

The organization’s founders – Israeli-American technology executives – understood the great power of the Internet and developed a first-of-its kind online product with global appeal and reach.