Scientists at Strathclyde are part of a new £20 million research hub that will develop artificial intelligence and data technologies to help the NHS prevent dementia, accelerate diagnosis and improve brain health.
The BRAINIAC Hub (AI and Emerging Technologies for Next Generation Brain Health Clinics) is funded by £10 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation.
A further £10 million will be contributed by industry, charity and NHS partners. The hub brings together 11 universities and ten NHS sites over six years and aims to cut the time waiting for a dementia diagnosis by half.
Ten brain health clinics will be created and networked to form one of the biggest research platforms to diagnose, prevent and treat dementia. The first clinics are expected to launch in 2029, initially open through NHS referral.
Strathclyde research
Professor Feng Dong, from Strathclyde’s Department of Computer and Information Sciences, is co-leading Theme 2: Causal AI for Personalised Prevention and Intervention. His research will develop new causal AI techniques to identify factors that directly influence dementia risk and predict how different preventive interventions could affect individual patients.
Professor Dong said: “Causal AI has enormous potential to help us understand not just who is at risk of dementia, but what we can do to reduce that risk. However, much of today's causal AI research is developed and tested under idealised assumptions that rarely hold in complex, real-world healthcare data.
Our ambition is to bridge this gap, developing robust and trustworthy causal AI methods that can support personalised prevention decisions in real clinical settings.
Transforming diagnosis
Around 982,000 people in the UK live with dementia, a figure projected to reach 1.4 million by 2040, when the annual cost to the UK is expected to more than double to £90 billion. Around a third of these have never received a diagnosis, and many of those referred wait months to be seen.
BRAINIAC will develop AI that brings together blood biomarkers, brain imaging, genetics, health records and digital cognitive assessments into a single, clear picture of a person’s brain health. Rather than building the technology in the lab and hoping it transfers, the hub will develop and test it inside the clinics operating as living laboratories, with more than 1,700 patients. Secure systems will let hospitals share AI models without sharing patient data, and people will be able to complete assessments at home, online or through an app, building on Exeter’s PROTECT study.
The hub aims to make assessment and diagnosis 30 to 50 per cent faster and identify more than 40 per cent of the people it assesses at early-risk, even before symptoms develop, when prevention and treatment are most likely to help. The clinics will also create one of the UK’s largest trial-ready groups of patients, making it easier to offer people places on clinical trials of new treatments.
Collaboration
People living with dementia and carers will co-design the tools throughout, working with Innovations in Dementia and Alzheimer’s Society will support the route into NHS use. The hub will also train more than 200 clinicians and engineers and support 10 to 20 small companies to bring new technologies into the NHS.
Led by the University of Exeter, BRAINIAC brings together the universities of Cambridge,Edinburgh, Newcastle, Oxford, Strathclyde and Swansea, Imperial College London, Queen Mary University of London, Queen’s University Belfast and UCL, with ten NHS sites across all four UK Nations.
BRAINIAC Director David Llewellyn, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Digital Health at the University of Exeter Medical School, said: “The tools we build in these NHS clinics will let us pick up the first signs before symptoms show, and offer people a personalised prevention plan to help them keep their brains sharp for longer.”