An AI-Driven Risk Score for Dementia Ready for Clinical Use
Description: Dementia prevalence is rising globally and projected to affect 168,000 New Zealanders by 2050, with Alzheimer’s disease the most common cause. “What does the future hold?” is a question people worried about their memory often ask health practitioners. However, the complexity of Alzheimer’s and related diseases makes predicting future dementia a huge challenge.Brain imaging and blood-based biomarkers can provide information on the earliest changes before dementia onset, but on their own do not account completely for a person’s clinical presentation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques provide a unique opportunity to combine large amounts of brain, blood, cognitive, genetic, clinical and general health data to predict risk for dementia. This project will develop an AI-tool ready for clinical use, which will help clinicians identify people who are most at risk of progressing from mild cognitive difficulties to dementia. Using emerging biomarkers and developing new AI applications, this project will grow biomedical technology and AI sectors in New Zealand and Singapore. Explainable AI methods will allow us to understand what data contributes most to predicting dementia risk, providing new scientific insights, potential treatment targets and diagnostic tests. The project brings together experts in New Zealand and Singapore, leveraging national longitudinal studies in both countries, on which AI models will be developed, validated, and tested. This will enable assessment of cross-population/ethnicity generalisability, reliability and fairness of AI predictions. The tool will be ready to deploy into clinical settings across New Zealand and Singapore, where it could help stratify patient management in limited resource settings, for example identify who requires priority referral to a specialist or inform risk-benefit discussions on the use of new disease modifying therapies. To facilitate future ease of use by clinicians, we are partnering with Siemens Healthineers to develop brain-image analysis tools, and we will co-design the dementia risk tool with doctors who will ultimately use it.The AI tool will predict level of risk for developing dementia and identify who will benefit most from targeted interventions (e.g. lifestyle or pharmaceutical therapies) to delay or prevent dementia onset. This will benefit patient lives, while simultaneously reducing healthcare costs for New Zealand and Singapore.The project is led by Dr Catherine Morgan and Professor Lynette Tippett (School of Psychology), Dr Katerina Taskova (School of Computer Science) at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland and Dr Narun Pat at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, University of Otago, working closely with dementia specialists at Te Whatu Ora, and collaborators at the National University of Singapore led by Associate Professor Saima Hilal.
Amount: NZD 4,000,000
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: 2025 Catalyst Strategic - Singapore Leveraging AI for Healthy Ageing
Start date: 2025-06-30
End date: 2028-08-01
Institution: University of Auckland
Funded outputs count: 12
Funder award ID: UOA2421
OpenAlex ID: G3455387964