Google has helped build robotic AI-powered technology to diagnose Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers from the tech giant teamed up with the New York Stem Cell Foundation on the robotic kit, which is “capable of manipulating test tube samples for cell culture”, to detect the degenerative disorder of the central nervous system.
There is currently no cure for the disease, which impacts the motor system.
NYSCF’s CEO Susan Solomon said: “Traditional drug discovery isn’t working very well, particularly for complex diseases like Parkinson’s.
“The robotic technology NYSCF has built allows us to generate vast amounts of data from large populations of patients, and discover new signatures of disease as an entirely new basis for discovering drugs that actually work.”
The Global Stem Cell Array system works by extracting Fibroblast cells grown from skin cells.
Google Research came up with the AI software to diagnose skin cells with 79 per cent accuracy, according to a paper filed by Nature Communications this week.
Daniel Paull, NYSCF’s senior vice president of discovery and platform development, added to The Register: “This was a new avenue of research in which we wanted to see if we could identify a signature in patient fibroblasts using artificial intelligence.
“Other groups have previously described alterations in the behavior of fibroblasts grown from Parkinson’s patients, specifically dysfunction in mitochondria and other organelles, though these have largely been small studies.”
The process begins by taking cells from the patient’s skin, which are then grown in test tubes, before being analyzed under a fluorescent microscope. The AI cameras then capture images of the cells before they are fed through a “convolutional neural network” to be examined.
The robots – which do not need to be manned – are then able to establish which cells belong to someone with Parkinson’s.
Source: news-journal.com
