Mitsuo Kawato, Ph.D. | Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Brain Information Communication Research Laboratory Group; Tomokazu Motegi, M.D., Ph.D. | Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Neuroscience Laboratories; Jessica E. Taylor, Ph.D. | Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Neuroscience Laboratories
Competition Sponsor: Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development
Awardee Year: 2020
We have previously identified brain activity patterns specific to different neuropsychiatric disorders (called “biomarkers”). We showed the therapeutic effects of using fMRI neurofeedback to train patients to “rewire” these to better resemble the brain activity patterns of healthy people. Unlike drugs, such intervention has resulted in no known negative side-effects to date and directly targets impairment-specific brain activity. Here, we propose the development of a similar intervention for cognitive age-related disorders. Innovative AI techniques will be used in the analysis of brain data to develop a method that can predict the probability of having/developing different levels of dementia. These results could then be used for early detection, determination of disease-stage and appropriate treatment, and as a basis for neurofeedback. It should therefore provide a novel useful method for increasing the quality of life of elderly people and might also be used to improve the cognitive function of healthy people.
To learn more about this proposal email healthylongevity@nas.edu.