Artificial intelligence Digital Pathology Able to Detect Early-Stage Parkinson Disease

A new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled digital pathology technology (Morphology Feature Array; PreciseDx, New York, NY) can diagnose Parkinson disease (PD) accurately in individuals before onset of severe symptoms.

Using image patches from biopsy samples, the algorithm had 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity for PD pathology compared with expert-assessment of the same image. For predicting a clinical diagnosis of PD, the algorithm was 69% accurate vs 64% accuracy with the expert pathology assessment.

"These findings show the potential for technology to aid in diagnosis of PD," said Jamie Eberling, PhD, senior vice president of Research Resources at The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson Research (MJFF). "Objective diagnostic tools, especially early in disease, are critical to drive care decisions and to design trials toward better treatments and cures."

Detection of α-synuclein within peripheral nerves of salivary glands was done via assessment of morphologic features in biopsy specimens from individuals with Lewy-type synucleinopathy (LTS) in early-stage PD. This approach to feature extraction and analysis allows development and validation of algorithms for a variety of clinical endpoints.

"Traditionally, pathology grading systems look at a few morphology components to make a diagnosis. Unlike any human-powered grading method, PreciseDx's AI Morphology Feature Array (MFA) can examine thousands of different features and leverage those relationships between them," said John F. Crary, MD-PhD, a professor in the Departments of Pathology, Neuroscience, and AI & Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This industry-changing study has shown that we need to revitalize the way we think about pathology and lean into using AI to detect diseases more accurately, such as PD. This enlightens the industry to a direct case study into how computational pathology can truly advance medicine in terms of accurately identifying and detecting diseases."

"We look forward to working with PreciseDx as it explores the potential of utilizing the AI platform in pathology across multiple diseases, including PD," said Erik Lium, PhD, president, Mount Sinai Innovation Partners and executive vice president and chief commercial innovation officer, Mount Sinai Health System.