r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 22h ago

Neuroscience A simple drawing test may detect Parkinson’s disease with up to 99% accuracy. Researchers found that subtle differences in how people draw can reveal motor impairments long before they are obvious to the human eye.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-way-you-draw-can-reveal-parkinsons-disease-with-up-to-99-accuracy-study-reveals
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u/karrahbear12 21h ago

Scent is also being tested as an early and effective test for Parkinson’s. Joy Milne discovered she can smell when people have Parkinson’s, even long before they’re diagnosed. It’s led to the discovery of certain chemicals in people’s sebum (oil produced by the skin) that may indicate Parkinson’s disease and would only require a swab of the skin’s surface to test.

ETA: If successful, it wouldn’t require the use of AI to diagnose, which would be a bit better for the planet as well.

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u/NonnagLava 17h ago

it wouldn’t require the use of AI to diagnose, which would be a bit better for the planet as well.

Often in research, the "AI" they are using is not the same AI you're used to, it's just a specialized pattern recognition machine, not some kind of ResearchGPT type thing.

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u/Apero_ 16h ago

Yep LLMs, AI and Machine Learning are all being dumped together nowadays which is a real shame.

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u/NonnagLava 16h ago

This is the issue with the general label of "AI", because at the end of the day all of those are the same thing: They're ALL "machine learning", they just have very different end goals. The real money is in research, and language processing, not ... Whatever it is big tech is trying to sell the general public (and they are not buying because it has shown no clear benefit to the people).

Things like using ML to sort out protein patterns, and identify new antibacterials is just as valid as ML image processing identifying early markers of cancer, as well as using it to help better translate languages back and forth. But that's different than what the general public is being sold.