AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT can help detect early stages of Alzheimer's disease: Study

The AI-based chatbot ChatGPT, which drove everyone insane with its ability to create human-like responses when prompted, has now achieved a new milestone in medical science as well! Researchers have found that it can help doctors detect the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

A study from the Philadelphia-based Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems found Open AI's ChatGPT was 80 per cent accurate in predicting early signs of dementia.

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The study's authors write in their peer-reviewed paper, published on Dec. 22 in the journal PLOS Digital Health, that the program offers a "promising approach" to assessing Alzheimer's disease.
"Our proof-of-concept shows that this could be a simple, accessible and adequately sensitive tool for community-based testing," Hualou Liang, a Drexel professor and co-author of the study, said in a news release.

"This could be very useful for early screening and risk assessment before a clinical diagnosis."

Researchers behind the ChatGPT study say because language impairment affects between 60 and 80 per cent of dementia patients, programs that can detect "subtle clues," such as grammar and pronunciation mistakes, hesitation, and forgetting the meaning of words, could help determine whether a patient needs a full examination. Although there is no cure for Alzheimer's, researchers say therapeutic options exist if the disease is spotted early.

"The most commonly used tests for early detection of Alzheimer's look at acoustic features, such as pausing, articulation and vocal quality, in addition to tests of cognition," Liang said. "But we believe the improvement of natural language processing programs provides another path to support early identification of Alzheimer's."

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The programme also outperformed an "acoustic" analysis that onlylooked at features like pauses, voice strength, and slurring in predicting the severity of a person's dementia.

Felix Agbavor, a doctoral researcher and the paper's lead author, said training ChatGPT with a "massive dataset of interviews," including some with Alzheimer's patients, would provide the information needed to detect speech patterns that could then identify future patients. Moving forward, the researchers plan to develop a web app that could be used as a pre-screening tool for Alzheimer's at home or in a doctor's office.

ChatGPT gained widespread attention after OpenAI made the AI-powered chatbot available for public testing, fascinating users with its ability to respond to a variety of questions.

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