7 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Richard McKinley level,” he confirms. “We can use them as a research tool to see, in general, epilepsy patients will have this particular pattern of atrophy or one pattern of atrophy in frontotemporal dementia and another in Alzheimer’s. It allows us to study the different mechanisms by which these diseases occur.” Richard adds that if cortical thickness analysis were applied to patients, it would be one element of a comprehensive diagnostic process considering various factors, including neurological tests and clinical assessments. “These methods only give us one piece of the puzzle,” he asserts. “If that piece doesn’t fit with everything else, then you don’t diagnose a patient with a particular disease.” Existing commercial tools, like brain imaging software FreeSurfer, provide volumes of the different lobes of the brain as biomarkers to radiologists. Though valuable, these markers are less sensitive to diseases than cortical thickness. Also, they take a significant amount of time – upwards of 8-10 hours – to process data for a single patient, presenting a clear challenge as clinical workflows demand quicker and more precise solutions. “Our goal initially was to produce something able to estimate cortical thickness, which was as reliable as the existing tools,” Richard recalls. “Now, we have evidence to suggest we have something more sensitive and reproducible while also running in a matter of seconds!” He adopted an approach that is becoming increasingly important in the medical imaging field by reframing a problem previously solved using lengthy iterative algorithms. In doing this, he drew
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