How AI is being used to find a cure for Parkinson’s Disease

April marks Parkinson’s Awareness Month, with the neurological disorder estimated to impact the lives of 10 million people, and the number of instances reported each year having recently doubled. While Parkinson’s Disease affects so many people, little is known about it, and indeed, how best to cure it. According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), however, the pervasiveness of AI presents a potential opportunity.

Here, the hyperscaler explains that, “the immense computational capacity of the cloud and the accelerating capabilities of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence are offering new hope. By transforming our understanding of the brain and how Parkinson’s impacts it, they are able to speed diagnosis, develop new treatments and better empower patients themselves.”Putting compute to useBest described as a progressive disease caused by the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, it is this element in particular that scientists are investigating and researching in order to find an effective cure.



“Because researchers don’t know what causes patients’ dopamine-producing neurons to start shutting down, they are unable to treat the root cause. Instead, most treatments have focused on replacing the lost dopamine. This can temporarily restore motor function, but can’t prevent the progression of the disease.

It also makes misdiagnosis a serious issue, as treatments that boost dopamine and help with Parkinson’s symptoms can worsen those of similar neurological conditions like dementia or essential tremor,” AWS explained.“Finding a genuine cure for Parkinson’s involves collecting and analyzing a vast amount of different types of data and using a much deeper and more granular understanding of the brain to enable new forms of treatment,” it enthused in a release shared with Hypertext.There are four key ways that AWS is making its cloud and AI-powered services available to researchers when it comes to Parkinson’s Disease, with it being used to help in decoding genomes, creating high-level databases, identifying biomarkers, and mapping the brain.

Real world researchStarting with decoding genomes, it is said that up to 15 percent of Parkinson’s cases can currently be linked to deletions or mutations in people’s genes. Here, AWS is working with the likes of California-based company Ultima Genomics, which has developed software, algorithms and training of its AI models on AWS for its next-generation DNA sequencer. “This scalable architecture reduces the cost of sequencing an entire human genome from roughly $1,000 to just $100.

This can help broaden genetic understanding of the disease, and enable the development of gene therapy treatments that can edit DNA to prevent it,” the hyperscaler pointed out.Shifting to data, the Michael J Fox Foundation runs The Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), which is a scientific study that uses wearable devices to gather more than 4 million data points from each participant every day. “It monitors people’s movement, tremors, sleep quality and more, and stores this data securely on AWS.

By combining it with patient brain scans, DNA, bio-samples and clinical assessments, it can use AI to search for patterns and correlations,” AWS pointed out.As for identifying biomarkers, the aforementioned PPMI discovered a biomarker for Parkinson’s that can be detected by analysing a patient’s spinal fluid, with this particular marker said to occur in 93 percent of people with the Parkinson’s Disease.Here, a company called Icometrix is using AI imaging solutions to monitor changes in brain tissue volume and explore how these correlate with the advance of the disease.

“Rebuilding its Deep Learning (inference) pipeline using AWS infrastructure has enabled Icometrix to drive big improvements in accuracy while reducing computation time,” noted Amazon Web Services.Lastly, for brain mapping, which is no small task, mapping the changes in the 200 billion cells of the brain is one of the objectives of the Brain Knowledge Platform, which is a new initiative led by the Allen Institute. It is building the world’s largest open-source database of brain cell data on the AWS platform.

“Combining high-performance AWS computing services with AI and Machine Learning (ML) services, such as Amazon SageMaker, enables the Brain Knowledge Platform to decode the characteristics of different brain cell types and monitor what happens to them as neurological diseases progress,” the hyperscaler has posited.(AI)ding the communityWhile much has been made of AI and the obsession to replace human creativity, it is at least promising to see the technology leveraged in other ways that seek to better our society and prolong human life when something as altering as Parkinson’s Disease strikes.“Rolling back the burden of Parkinson’s, and improving the lives of those living with the condition, involves approaching the challenge from a number of different directions, simultaneously.

Greater understanding enables earlier diagnosis and a wider range of treatments that significantly enhance quality of life. Wider awareness sweeps away stigma and grows interest in technologies that can better support patients,” shared AWS.“Collective action through clinical trials and research projects increases patients’ sense of agency while bringing a cure closer,” it concluded.

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