Unmasking Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease

This Apple Science podcast features Professor Jim Brewer of UCSD and his neurology practice at the Human Memory Laboratory in La Jolla, California. Dr. Brewer sought a practical way to measure shrinkage of the hippocampus, the memory gateway to the brain, and gain objective evidence of early Alzheimer's disease as the cause of mild memory loss. Brewer’s practice became a beta site for NeuroQuant, a Mac-based image analysis system that processes MRI DICOM brain-scan images. It quantifies the volumes of all regions of the brain and provides statistical data showing hippocampus size for healthy patients of the same age. Brewer runs NeuroQuant on an iMac, along with OsiriX, an open-source DICOM viewer and PACS workstation. Existing methods required manually tracing the organ on 256 image slices from an MRI brain scan – a process that can take 100 hours. Using Apple computers, pulling a patient’s DICOM files from the hospital PACS, Brewer can quantify hippocampus size in about 8.5 minutes.