#Nueral network radar series#

In terms of clinical care, the approach can help in the assessment of Parkinson’s patients in traditionally underserved communities, including those who live in rural areas and those with difficulty leaving home due to limited mobility or cognitive impairment,” she says. “In terms of drug development, the results can enable clinical trials with a significantly shorter duration and fewer participants, ultimately accelerating the development of new therapies. Katabi notes that the study has important implications for Parkinson’s drug development and clinical care. The research team’s algorithm was tested on 7,687 individuals, including 757 Parkinson’s patients. In the United States alone, it afflicts over 1 million people and has an annual economic burden of $51.9 billion. The fastest-growing neurological disease in the world, Parkinson’s is the second-most common neurological disorder, after Alzheimer's disease. “Some medical studies have shown that respiratory symptoms manifest years before motor symptoms, meaning that breathing attributes could be promising for risk assessment prior to Parkinson’s diagnosis.” This motivated us to consider the potential of detecting the disease from one’s breathing without looking at movements,” Katabi says. “A relationship between Parkinson’s and breathing was noted as early as 1817, in the work of Dr. The breathing signal is then fed to the neural network to assess Parkinson’s in a passive manner, and there is zero effort needed from the patient and caregiver. To do so, the team developed a device with the appearance of a home Wi-Fi router, but instead of providing internet access, the device emits radio signals, analyzes their reflections off the surrounding environment, and extracts the subject’s breathing patterns without any bodily contact.

The MIT researchers demonstrated that the artificial intelligence assessment of Parkinson's can be done every night at home while the person is asleep and without touching their body. Over the years, researchers have investigated the potential of detecting Parkinson’s using cerebrospinal fluid and neuroimaging, but such methods are invasive, costly, and require access to specialized medical centers, making them unsuitable for frequent testing that could otherwise provide early diagnosis or continuous tracking of disease progression. They are joined by Yuan and 12 colleagues from Rutgers University, the University of Rochester Medical Center, the Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Boston University College of Health and Rehabilition. Katabi, who is also an affiliate of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, is the senior author. Yang is first author on a new paper describing the work, published today in Nature Medicine. The neural network, which was trained by MIT PhD student Yuzhe Yang and postdoc Yuan Yuan, is also able to discern the severity of someone’s Parkinson’s disease and track the progression of their disease over time.

#Nueral network radar series#

The tool in question is a neural network, a series of connected algorithms that mimic the way a human brain works, capable of assessing whether someone has Parkinson’s from their nocturnal breathing - i.e., breathing patterns that occur while sleeping. Now, Dina Katabi, the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and principal investigator at MIT Jameel Clinic, and her team have developed an artificial intelligence model that can detect Parkinson’s just from reading a person’s breathing patterns. Parkinson’s disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose as it relies primarily on the appearance of motor symptoms such as tremors, stiffness, and slowness, but these symptoms often appear several years after the disease onset.