Global pharmaceutical company Eisai, Bill Gates’ private office Gates Ventures, Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), medical research not-for-profit LifeArc and the University of Edinburgh have a partnership that aims to transform care for people living with dementia.
The collaboration, named NEURii, uses high-quality data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver projects that have the potential to make a meaningful difference in patients’ lives while maintaining data security and public trust.
SCAN-DAN - predicting the risk of dementia from brain scans
The first project from NEURii is called ‘Scottish AI in Neuroimaging to predict Dementia and Neurodegenerative Disease’ (SCAN-DAN). Data scientists and clinical researchers are using brain scans from the entire Scottish population, to build a software tool that they hope will be able to predict a person’s risk of dementia.
The team of 20, from the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee, has approval to use a unique, large data set made up of CT and MRI brain scans from patients in Scotland from 2008 to 2018, representing 1.6 million images.
Professor Will Whiteley, of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, is co-leading the SCAN-DAN project. He said:
Currently treatments for dementia are expensive, scarce and of uncertain value. If we can collect data from a large group of people at high risk, who then give their consent to take part in trials, we can really start to develop new treatments.
The ultimate aim is to build a digital healthcare tool that radiologists can use when scanning for other conditions to determine a person’s dementia risk, and to diagnose early stages of related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.
NeurEYE - harnessing high street eye tests
The second project called NeurEYE has collected almost a million eye scans from opticians across Scotland. Data scientists and clinical researchers are developing a digital tool that can predict a person’s risk of dementia from a routine eye test.
Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology at the University of Edinburgh and NeurEYE co-lead, Baljean Dhillon, said:
The eye can tell us far more than we thought possible. The blood vessels and neural pathways of the retina and brain are intimately related. But, unlike the brain, we can see the retina with the simple, inexpensive equipment found in every high street in the UK and beyond.
Dr Dave Powell is the Chief Scientific Officer at LifeArc, one of the
NEURii collaborators. Speaking on behalf of the partners he said:
Harnessing the potential of digital innovations in this way could ultimately save the NHS more than £37m a year because the hope is that it will speed up the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative conditions like dementia.
For both the above projects, the scientists will then use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse the image data, linked to relevant patient data on demographics, treatment history and pre-existing conditions. This data is anonymised and patients can’t be identified, but it allows researchers to find patterns that could indicate a person’s risk of developing dementia, as well as giving a broad picture of brain health.
Again, for both projects, the data will be held safely in the Scottish National Safe Haven which provides a secure platform for the research use of NHS electronic data. This resource is commissioned by Public Health Scotland and hosted by the Edinburgh International Data Facility through EPCC at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr Ricardo Sáinz Fuertes, Global Director of Digital Health Solutions at Eisai and Programme Director for NEURii, said:
The spirit of NEURii is to fulfil the promise of data science for healthcare. We are joining forces globally, in a way that hasn’t been done before, to provide innovative digital projects with the chance of becoming solutions to complex neurodegenerative disorders like dementia.
