A Wyss Center spin-off providing a one-stop-shop MRI solution
A new vision for early dementia detection
BrainQuant is a smart software that enables non-invasive, early, and precise individual diagnosis for neurological diseases, and detects cognitive decline before symptoms occur in patients. This innovative start-up extends routinely structural brain MRI to include functional information, while eliminating the need for radiation exposure and the cost of FDG-PET.
BrainQuant scans can reveal structural changes to brain tissue early enough to detect morphological changes. This early biomarker detection has the potential to prevent irreversible brain damage which is detected at a later stage by traditional methods. This technology was initially developed at the Wyss Center through the Neuro Quantification Tool project.
BrainQuant is based on findings that arterial spin labeling (ASL) is a viable alternative to metabolic brain imaging techniques for clinical applications including the detection and differentiation between different types of dementia. The software flexibly accommodates a wide variety of ASL sequences from different MRI machine models. Novel artificial intelligence algorithms identify the MRI sequences collected, process the data accordingly and output a consistent result in line with the ones typically used by neuro-radiologists.
“Neuroimaging is amongst the most promising areas of research for early detection of dementia including Alzheimer’s disease. We believe that future treatments could target dementia in its earliest stages, before irreversible brain damage or mental decline has occurred.”
“Machine learning techniques have been extensively tailored to neuroimaging data to capture their specific spatiotemporal features. We will rely on efficient algorithms to extract information in a way that is intepretableto the clinicians.”
