Using Algorithms To Tackle Alzheimer’s Disease
by Regina Nuzzo, PhD
Biomedical Computation Review
Fall 2007
Feature Story
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tubingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing rapidly. Confused and helpless, she was growing inarticulate and fearful of her family, Alzheimer reported. Auguste died four years later.
During the autopsy Alzheimer found dramatic shrinkage in Auguste’s brain, with cells that were already dead and dying at the time of her death — plus two kinds of microscopic deposits that Alzheimer had never seen before. He summed it up in his presentation abstract: “All in all, we are faced obviously with a peculiar disease process.”
Peek inside the skull of a couch potato watching reruns on TV and you’ll see non-stop patterns of blood flow throughout the brain. If you learn to pick out which activity patterns match up with, say, a good belly laugh, then you might be on your way to reading the viewer’s internal experiences. Recently, experts from a variety of fields competed to glean subjective perceptions like humor from functional MRIs of TV viewers. They were surprisingly successful. 