How AI is Revolutionizing The Future of Brain Health with Dr. Paula Edwards
Paula Edwards, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor at the Rollins School of Public Health in the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Department. Her background in industrial engineering centers around implementing data and analytics into health systems. She is the Senior Director of Data Science Strategy for Emory's Goizueta Brain Health Institute. Dr. Edwards is also co-leader of the Data Management Core for the Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
We sat down with her for an interview regarding the future of brain health and how artificial intelligence is helping to propel it forward.
Q: How do you perceive the current state of brain health research, particularly in the context of AI applications?
It's a really exciting time to be in brain health research for a number of reasons. The first-ever disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer's disease were recently approved, and several treatments for Parkinson's are in the FDA queue being evaluated for approval. I think we're close to having better interventions for prevention and treatment for those diseases. Part of how we've gotten there, and how we will really achieve that vision, is through AI.
One of the things that I have learned as I've joined Emory's Goizueta Brain Health Institute team is that brain health is really complex and highly variable. The only way that we're going to get to effective treatment and prevention strategies is through personalized medicine. So, the use of genomics, proteomics, imaging and device data is key to understanding what is happening in these diseases from a biological perspective and a disease progression perspective.
Q: How do you see AI helping to improve early detection of brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, epilepsy and Parkinson’s?
Early detection is absolutely critical because with a lot of these diseases, the underlying pathology that causes them is present long before any symptoms are present. The best opportunity for prevention and treatment is before people show symptoms. The more that we can move to early screening and detection and identifying people who are at high risk, the better opportunity we're going to have to either slow or prevent progression or cure these diseases. There is some really cool stuff that's going on. For instance, there are researchers monitoring epilepsy patients' EEG (electroencephalogram) from sleep trackers during sleep studies to predict when they're most likely to have seizures.
We are doing interesting work with colleagues in the Madabhushi Lab. They're looking at using retinal scans to identify patterns that are indicative of Alzheimer's. It’s enabling less invasive methods of early detection for conditions like Alzheimer's disease. Another cool project that we're piloting with primary care providers right now in the Alzheimer's space uses a tablet-based tool to diagnose Alzheimer's and cognitive impairment. The primary care provider administers a digital clock drawing and recall task that's based on a mini cognitive assessment. They then use AI to get more precise results, which decreases the amount of time it takes to screen a patient for cognitive decline.
Q: Do you believe that with the introduction of AI into healthcare we may start to see a cure for some of these diseases?
That's one of the things that excites me; we're so close. I think with AI and having access to all these different multimodal data types – like imaging, genomic and proteomic data and deep phenotyping data – it's going to unlock what's happening with these diseases, as well as help identify potential interventions or treatments.
Q: Emory University, particularly the Winship Cancer Institute, just received the ARPA-H grant worth $17.6 million. The grant will be used for research regarding how to better treat cancer patients during surgery and integrates AI into the project. How do you feel about the use of AI for the project?
I think for the research team to accomplish what they're doing, they couldn't do it without AI. And for brain health, I'm really interested in what they're doing for a couple of reasons. For people who have brain tumors, I think that it will improve their outcomes. In terms of neurodegenerative and other brain health diseases, researcher David Gutman has a project that’s digitizing neuropathology slides from a large Alzheimer's disease cohort that we've studied longitudinally for a long time. I'm hoping that some of the methods and tools that researchers develop under the grant project are things that we could adapt and start to use as we digitize the neuropathology data to advance the science on the brain health side.
Q: Do you have any final words about why it's so important that we should all care about the state of brain health research?
For all of us, our brain health, including our mental health, is really important to our quality of life. As patients and individuals, we should all be concerned about our brain health. I think we all know somebody who has been touched by one of these diseases and have seen just how devastating it is. Anything we can do to advance the science and avoid that for future people and generations is going to be incredibly powerful.