In 2000, actor Michael J. Fox launched The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) for Parkinson’s Research and became one of the most well-known spokesmen for finding a cure for the condition.
What To Know: A partnership between the MJFF has been launched with International Business Machines Corp IBM to use machine learning for scientific breakthroughs.
A milestone was announced Thursday: A new artificial intelligence model groups symptom patterns of Parkinson’s Disease.
“The model also predicts the progression of these symptoms in timing and severity, by learning from what’s known as longitudinal patient data,” the companies said.
The AI methods were tested with data from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, an international study sponsored by the MJFF. Previous studies have focused on baseline information and this study relied on seven years of patient data.
The modeling results allow the study to gain insight into progression pathways and the varying state of the patient’s daily living activities.
The AI model was able to predict the state of Parkinson’s Disease including outcomes like dementia and the ability to walk unassisted.
Related Link: IBM, Pfizer Collaborate On Early Alzheimer’s Detection With Artificial Intelligence
Why It’s Important: Parkinson’s Disease affects over 6 million people globally. There's currently no cure for the disease. Research has posted limited results of why the disease acts so differently between individuals.
The goals of the project are to use artificial intelligence to help with patient management and clinical trial design.
“Hopefully by using machine learning to learn from large amounts of patient data, clinicians and researchers could have a new tool to better predict the notoriously varying progression of symptoms in individual Parkinson’s patients,” the companies said.
The disease can be better treated and the best candidates can be targeted in clinical trials, according to the milestone research.
“We hope that by enabling such predictions, the model can help in patient management and provide more specific inclusion criteria and outcome definitions during clinical trial design.”
IBM will refine the model to provide more characterization of disease states using genomic and neuroimaging measurements in the future.
Photo: Paul Hudson, Supernino / Wikimedia
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