Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Rome, Italy, September 21st, 2023 – Today, Rome marked World Alzheimer's Day with an event focused on cognitive decline, dementia, and finding new ways to diagnose and treat it.
The lecturers discussed the National Dementia Plan. Recently implemented in Italy, the plan aims to promote and improve the quality of care for diseases related to cognitive decline. One of its initiatives is reorganizing the Centers for Cognitive Disorders and Dementia (CDCD).
Professor Giovanni Capobianco, director of the Geriatrics Unit at Sant'Eugenio ASL Roma 2, took the stage to share his experience implementing a Centre for Early Diagnosis of Cognitive Impairment and introducing advanced neuroradiology tools for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease.
One of the tools he is currently using is Quantib® ND, our AI software for atrophy quantification of brain structures, such as the hippocampus or the temporal lobe. The tool will further be implemented in the Italian regional network project.
"The main advantage of using AI to support diagnosis is finding agreement between the results derived from advanced neuroradiology tools and those derived from second-level neuropsychological assessments. This allows patients at greater risk of developing dementia to be intercepted earlier", explains Prof. Capobianco.
This partnership is a great opportunity to expand the clinical implementation of AI in healthcare, while maintaining a line of collaboration between academic centers and hospitals. This can be useful to accelerate and improve confidence in AI software and its clinical results.
"The goal of this multidimensional approach is to ensure, at the time of early diagnosis, a concordance between the assessments based on advanced tools of clinical neuropsychology and those based on advanced tools of neuroradiology. Searching for correspondences between the different clinical, textural, and neuroradiologic dimensions allows for the identification of risk classes of patients with possible clinical evolution of the disease and planning the most appropriate care interventions", added Prof. Capobianco.
Other initiatives in this regional project are conducting medical, biomedical, and epidemiological research related to dementia. It also includes creating a registry in which patients will be categorized by their type of dementia to improve the planning, management, monitoring, and evaluation of patient care.