'Google-Like' Database of Brain Scans May Help Doctors Treat Disorders

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By Ann-Marie Alcantara2014-02-04 15:57:00 UTC

A team of Johns Hopkins engineers and radiologists are building a "Google-like" searchable digital library of children's brain scans in an effort to improve the way doctors treat and diagnose patients with brain disorders.

Supported by a three-year grant of $600,000 from the National Institutes of Health, the brain-scan database will help doctors in two ways. They will be able to search the database for images that match a patient's scan and identify a change in a brain structure that shows the early onset of a disease. Identifying diseases earlier means a quicker start for treatment.

"We're creating a pediatric-brain data bank that will let doctors look at MRI brain scans of children who have already been diagnosed with illnesses like epilepsy or psychiatric disorders," Michael Miller, a John Hopkins biomedical engineering professor and the project's lead researcher, said. "It will provide a way to share important new discoveries about how changes in brain structures are linked to brain disorders.”

The database currently has more than 5,000 whole-brain MRI scans of children treated at Johns Hopkins. The scans are indexed and sorted into 22 categories, including infections and epilepsy. Due to the high volume of information in the database, researchers believe it will help physicians easily recognize and classify pediatric brain disorders, as well as reclassify and identify new brain diseases.

While the database is presently limited to patients and physicians in the Johns Hopkins network, researchers believe it can easily be replicated. Along with Marilyn Albert, a John Hopkins neurology professor, the team is building a similar database that will focus on brain disorders found in elderly patients, according to the Hub, a news center at Johns Hopkins.

The medical field is exploring new territory with these databases. "This research is one of the first real applications of big-data analytics, taking medical information from large numbers of patients, removing anything that would identify specific individuals and then bringing the data into the cloud to allow very high-powered analysis," said Jonathan Lewin, chief radiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

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Topics: brain database, digital brain scan, Health & Fitness, Johns Hopkins, U.S., US & World

Image: iStockphoto, svedoliver