Farrer Park Hospital enhances dementia services with AI MRI screening

This aims to provide more comprehensive results.

Farrer Park Hospital (FPH) announced on 21 September that it enhanced its dementia services by offering artificial intelligence (AI)-supported magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) screening tools for dementia.

Currently, diagnosis of dementia involves combining the data from examinations, laboratory results, and brain scans. MRI brain scan is the most common tool used to peer into an individual's brain. However, its function in detecting dementia is limiting, often resulting in diagnosing strokes and brain tumours. 

To provide patients with more comprehensive results, FPH introduced a tool to quantify brain tissue volume.

Consultant neuroradiologist and neurointerventionalist, Santhosh Raj, said, "Using AI to quantify brain tissue volume in regular MRI brain scans, physicians, patients and caregivers can now gain additional disease-specific information to improve diagnosis and care plans. Another advantage of quantifying brain tissue volume in MRI scans is that it can also help assess care plans and medication effectiveness."

"Dementia affects patients in more ways than we think. Often, the diagnosis remains elusive in the early stages. Thus, enhancing the tools that we have brings us a step closer to making the right diagnosis. With an earlier diagnosis, one can institute earlier treatment, interventions and also plan for the future. It will also help caregivers understand their patients better, thus improving the caregiver-patient relationship and reducing caregiver burnout," according to CEO Peng Chung Mien.

People suspected of dementia or memory loss symptoms may consider undergoing the brain tissue volume quantification without the full MRI brain scan if they have already performed an MRI scan recently or within a year.