{"id":268155,"date":"2025-10-01T03:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T03:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/268155\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T03:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T03:25:10","slug":"new-ai-tool-finds-hidden-brain-lesions-that-doctors-miss-in-children-with-epilepsy-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/268155\/","title":{"rendered":"New AI Tool Finds Hidden Brain Lesions That Doctors Miss in Children With Epilepsy : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

An artificial intelligence<\/a> tool that can detect tiny, hard-to-spot brain malformations in children with epilepsy could help patients access life-changing surgery quicker, Australian researchers said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

It is the latest example of how AI, which can crunch vast amounts of data, is changing healthcare by assisting doctors with diagnoses.<\/p>\n

Epilepsy has several different causes, and overall around three in 10 cases are down to structural abnormalities in the brain, experts say.<\/p>\n

Related: Breakthrough Gene Therapy Slows Huntington’s Disease by 75%<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

These are often missed on MRI<\/a> scans \u2013 especially the smallest lesions, sometimes hidden at the bottom of a brain fold.<\/p>\n

A team led by Emma Macdonald-Laurs, a paediatric neurologist at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, trained an AI tool on child brain images to find lesions the size of a blueberry or smaller.<\/p>\n

“They’re frequently missed and many children are not considered as surgical candidates,” Macdonald-Laurs told a briefing ahead of the publication of her team’s study in the journal Epilepsia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“The tool doesn’t replace radiologists or epilepsy doctors, but it’s like a detective that helps us put the puzzle pieces together quicker so we can offer potentially life-changing surgery,” she said.<\/p>\n

\"TwoExample images of two patients included in the training set with brain lesions that were not reported on their first MRI. (Macdonald-Laurs et al., Epilepsia, 2025<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Of the patients who took part, with conditions known as cortical dysplasia and focal epilepsy, 80 percent had previously had an MRI scan come back as normal.<\/p>\n

When the researchers used the AI tool to analyse both MRI and another type of medical scan called a PET, its success rate was 94 percent for one test group and 91 percent for another.<\/p>\n

Out of 17 children in the first group, 12 had surgery to remove their brain lesions, and 11 are now seizure-free, said<\/a> Macdonald-Laurs’s team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.<\/p>\n

“Our next plans are to test this detector in more real-life hospital settings on new undiagnosed patients,” she said.<\/p>\n

Epilepsy, which causes recurrent seizures, affects about one in 200 children, and about a third of cases are drug-resistant.<\/p>\n

“This work is really exciting” as a proof of concept and the results are “really impressive”, Konrad Wagstyl, a biomedical computing expert at King’s College London (KCL), told AFP.<\/p>\n

Similar research published in February by a KCL team using AI on MRI data spotted 64 percent of epilepsy-linked brain lesions that were missed by radiologists.<\/p>\n

The Australian researchers used MRI with PET, “but some caveats are that PET is expensive, it’s not as widely available as MRI, and there is a dose of radiation like a CT scan or an X-ray associated with it,” Wagstyl noted.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Agence France-Presse<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An artificial intelligence tool that can detect tiny, hard-to-spot brain malformations in children with epilepsy could help patients…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":268156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-268155","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115296778548846443","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}