A team of 20 data scientists and clinical researchers from Scotland are set to analyse data from CT and MRI scans using AI to identify patterns that could indicate the likelihood of a person developing dementia.

The objective is to create a digital tool that radiologists can use when scanning patients to determine their dementia risk and diagnose early stages of related diseases.

The team, working as part of a global research collaboration called NEURii, have been given access to sensitive patient records with the approval of the Public Benefit and Privacy Panel for Health and Social Care, a part of NHS Scotland.

The project, called Scottish AI in Neuroimaging to predict Dementia and Neurodegenerative Disease (SCAN-DAN), will use 1.6 million images of brain scans taken from the entire Scottish population between 2008 and 2018.

The data will be accessed through the Scottish National Safe Haven, an online research environment that couples access to anonymised health data with a high-powered computing service, which is owned by Public Health Scotland.

Professor Emanuele Trucco, an expert in AI and medical imaging at the University of Dundee, said: “This new data set will be of great use to neurological researchers.

“Should we establish a successful proof of concept, we will have a suite of software tools that are smoothly and unobtrusively integrated with routine radiology operations that assist clinical decision-making and flag the risk of dementia as early as possible.”

Dementia currently affects an estimated 90,000 people in Scotland, with around 3,000 under 65 years old, with projections showing a 50% increase in the number of people with dementia in the next 20 years. Some estimates suggest 1 in 3 people born today will go on to develop dementia.

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By 2031, the cost of the disease to Scotland is projected to rise to £2.6 – £2.9 billion, while the cost of dementia care for individuals in specialised care homes in Scotland currently stands between £1,047 and £1,346 per week.

Professor Will Whiteley of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, who is co-leading the SCAN-DAN project, said: “Currently treatments for dementia are expensive, scarce and of uncertain value. If we can collect data from a large group of people at high risk, who then give their consent to take part in trials, we can really start to develop new treatments.”

Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Edinburgh made a breakthrough in predicting whether patients are at risk of diseases including Alzheimer’s dementia by using machine learning to analyse medical data from the UK Biobank to predict the risk of disease up to 10 years before diagnosis.