AI optical scans detect Parkinson’s 7 years in advance: researchers

AI-driven technology being used by optometrists in the United Kingdom is able to spot Parkinson’s disease through eye scans with an average seven years of warning, according to researchers from London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital.

“This is the first time anyone has shown these findings several years before diagnosis,” according to a release on the breakthrough detection.

“This work demonstrates the potential for eye data, harnessed by the technology to pick up signs and changes too subtle for humans to see. We can now detect very early signs of Parkinson’s, opening up new possibilities for treatment,” added Moorfields ophthalmologist Alastair Denniston.

The high-tech 3D scan — technically known as an optical coherence tomography — takes “less than a minute” and produces an extremely detailed analysis of a patient’s retina “down to a thousandth of a millimeter,” according to the hospital.

“The retina provides a minimally invasive window into the central nervous system and can be imaged rapidly using modern high-resolution devices,” researchers reported, adding that “brain imaging for diagnosis and disease monitoring in Parkinson disease is limited as a scalable resource.”

Scientifically, Parkinson’s was most associated with a reduced thickness of two optical layers: the macular ganglion cell-inner plexiform and a retinal nerve fiber during testing.

“The association between retinal layer thicknesses and incident Parkinson disease had not yet been explored,” according to the published findings.

“However, findings in early and prodromal Parkinson disease do corroborate our results.”

As for the optical findings that aim to combat the neurodegenerative disease, researcher Siegfried Wagner is simply “amazed.”

“While we are not yet ready to predict whether an individual will develop Parkinson’s, we hope that this method could soon become a pre-screening tool for people at risk of disease,” he said.

The new medical analysis need not stop there, though.

Similar advancements in eye scans, called “oculomics,” have led to faster detection of other neuro-diseases and disorders, including Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.

“Finding signs of a number of diseases before symptoms emerge means that, in the future, people could have the time to make lifestyle changes to prevent some conditions arising, and clinicians could delay the onset and impact of life-changing neurodegenerative disorders,” Wagner said.