AI makes it possible to measure brain's fluid flow -written by Nitisha Gurjar (BA English Hons.)

Now through AI, it will be possible to measure the brain’s blood vessels, which might also help in creating new treatments for Alzheimer’s.

 

AI or Artificial Intelligence is basically a system made with the help of science and technology to perform tasks that are only possible by a human brain.  The system stimulates and mimics human cognitive functions like learning, problem-solving, reasoning, and decision-making . The concept of AI has been present for a long time now, but recently the use of AI has increased on a vast level.

 

In today’s time, AI is being used in almost every field, including medicine. The AI creators are recently working on a new technique that can measure fluid flow around the brain’s blood vessels. A team of mechanical engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists led by Professor Douglas Kelley from the University of Rochester developed an AI technique to accurately calculate brain fluid flow. The results of this study are published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"In this study, we combined some measurements from inside the animal models with a novel AI technique that allowed us to effectively measure things that nobody's ever been able to measure before," these are the words of Professor Kelley.

 

It is being said that after developing this technique many treatments for Alzheimer’s can be developed. Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease, which is the most common type of dementia. Because of it the brain cells themselves degenerate and die, which leads to memory loss and many other mental dysfunctions.

 

At first, the team has been able to perform two-dimensional investigations on the fluid flow in perivascular areas in the past by implementing tiny particulates into the fluid and tracking their position and velocity over time, but in order to fully comprehend the complexity of the system, scientists needed more difficult measures.

 

George Karniadakis from Brown University worked with the team to use artificial intelligence to solve that problem.  They combined the existing 2D data with neural networks that were guided by physics to provide previously unheard-of high-resolution views of the system.

 

"This is a way to reveal pressures, forces, and the three-dimensional flow rate with much more accuracy than we can otherwise do," words of Kelley in this research, "The pressure is important because nobody knows for sure quite what pumping mechanism drives all these flows around the brain yet. This is a new field."

 

The National Institutes of Health Brain Initiative, the Army Research Office's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives program, and the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program all provided funding for this study.