ROCHESTER — A team of Mayo Clinic researchers are on a mission to extract more information out of electroencephalograms, or EEGs, with artificial intelligence and machine learning. "There's a lot of information in the brain's electrical activity about how healthy the mind is. But that information really has not been unlocked," said Dr.
David Jones, a neurologist and director of the Mayo Clinic Neurology AI Program. "It has not been measurable and standardized in a way that can be used to provide health care." Jones and some of his colleagues developed and are testing an AI tool that analyzes EEG scans, which measure brain waves, and finds patterns to identify early-stage cognitive issues.
They published their findings in the journal Brain Communications on Wednesday, July 31. EEG machines record one's brain activity through electrodes that are placed on the scalp. Jones said this century-old technology is used routinely in neurology.
"The most common one for us is epilepsy evaluation," Jones said. "It's revolutionized our understanding of sleep, so in sleep medicine and sleep neurology, it's a very important tool." ADVERTISEMENT To train the AI tool, the research team gave it data from 12,176 EEGs from 11,001 Mayo Clinic patients.
Jones said the AI's analysis of the data was "unsupervised," meaning that researchers did not give it information on what diagnoses the patients had, or what patterns typically appear in brains with Alzheimer's disease or other conditions. "One of.