Can ChatGPT Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease?
OpenAI’s GPT-3 models can identify speech clues that may predict the early stages of dementia
Before the fall
By the time an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis arrives, it’s invariably too late for a cure. Beneath the symptoms we currently use for that diagnosis hides a decade or more of brain damage. The same is true for other forms of dementia. Our brains do their best to mitigate the accumulating damage and they’re pretty good at it. Until it becomes too much.
Of course, there are plenty of things we can do to lower our risk. Add daily movement, don’t smoke, sleep well, adhere to a balanced dietary pattern, and so on. This is not rocket science. And yet, it doesn’t seem to be enough. It’s hard to encourage people to change their lifestyles without a more immediate trigger. The modern sedentary, obesogenic Western environment isn’t helping either.
So, an important part of the research into Alzheimer’s disease focuses on enabling an earlier diagnosis. Scientists are looking at predictive makers in the form of specific blood proteins, PET scans, or changes in the eyes, and machine learning systems might lend a hand by figuring out how to diagnose (early) dementia on MRI scans.
