The National Yang Ming Chiao Tong University (NYCU) and the Taipei Veterans General Hospital hailed a new milestone for disease diagnosis in the medical industry with a brain imaging system they jointly developed that could isolate levels of cerebral regression suffered by patients with mental diseases at different stages of their lives.
The system, named Brain Probe, won this year’s Edison Awards’ Gold award in the Advancements in Neurological Treatments subcategory.
NYCU’s School of Medicine dean Albert Yang (楊智傑) said that neuropsychiatric diagnoses have long relied on doctor-patient interaction and reference patients’ known family medical history.
Photo courtesy of the National Yang Ming Chiao Tong University
The system allows doctors to precisely quantify the regression rates that different cerebral regions experience due to aging or as a cause of a disorder, he said on Friday.
While initially developed with identifying schizophrenia in mind, the platform could potentially be extended to diagnose major neuropsychiatric diseases.
The team based its solution on long-term observation data of brain aging and disease-related brain regression, and determined the regression model for the gray and white matter areas in 138 brain regions, Yang said.
The model would allow doctors to predict regression trends based on the patient’s age or the stage of their illness, isolate critically abnormal regions and prescribe more targeted treatments, he said.
This development is a far cry from previous technology, which was unable to provide doctors with a distinct causal relation between imagery and symptoms, he said.
The system is already being used for research and clinical assessments of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, Yang said.
Research data generated by the system show that schizophrenic patients experience a significant shrinkage of the general brain size in the 22 years after they are first diagnosed with schizophrenia, while exhibiting greater cortical thickness in the early stages, he said.
Schizophrenic patients have also been shown to see a significant regression in gray matter in the temporal and frontal lobes, as well as the insula, he said.
The system’s data also show that bipolar and depressive patients exhibit anomalies in the anterior cingulate cortex, he said.
Such information is beneficial to doctors, who would be able to more precisely target areas for repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation or deep brain stimulation therapies, Yang said.
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