Uc Science Today

Diagnosing brain disorders can often be a challenge for doctors, as some psychological diseases have overlapping symptoms. These include memory loss in patients with depression and suppressed mood in people suffering from dementia. But neuroimaging and machine learning can help improve diagnosis. In fact, radiologist Cyrus Raji of the University of California, San Francisco, led a study to prove just that. “Each individual had a perfusion neuroimaging, where there is a nuclear tracer injected into them and that allowed the mapping of the blood flow in the brain. And that allow us to quantify blood flow in 128 regions of the brain and use machine learning analysis to separate who had depression or cognitive disorders or both." Machine learning is used often to quickly process and analyze patients’ data in digital format. “What machine learning will do in the future for research is it will help us find new biomarkers that are helpful in predicting either who has a disorder or who has one disorder vs another