In a groundbreaking development, researchers at Mount Sinai have unveiled an innovative AI model named “HistoAge,” shedding light on the intricacies of how the human brain ages and deteriorates. This revolutionary algorithm predicts age at death and unravels the mysteries of brain aging and neurodegenerative disorders through the power of artificial intelligence.
HistoAge relies on an analysis of approximately 700 digitized hippocampal sections from elderly brain donors. This AI-driven tool demonstrates remarkable accuracy in predicting age and identifying regions vulnerable to age-related changes. More notably, HistoAge displays a strong correlation with cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s-type abnormalities, providing a reliable metric for investigating neurodegenerative progression.
The significance of HistoAge lies in its potential to offer transformative insights into the aging brain, representing a significant stride toward understanding and potentially mitigating age-accelerated neurodegeneration. The algorithm predicts age at death with an average accuracy of within 5.45 years by analyzing the cellular composition of human brain tissue specimens, highlighting its robustness and precision.
Age acceleration, which measures the differences between biological and chronological age in the brain, provides crucial insights into the brain’s mechanisms and functions. It unveils age-related changes, functional decline, and early indicators of brain disorders. Mount Sinai’s researchers utilized AI to develop the HistoAge algorithm, a tool capable of predicting age at death based on the cellular composition of human brain tissue specimens.
The hippocampus, central to brain aging and age-dependent neurodegenerative diseases, serves as a key region for this analysis. The AI model predicts age at death based solely on digitized hippocampal sections, a task beyond human accuracy. This AI-based approach outperforms current measures of age acceleration, showing stronger associations with cognitive impairment, cerebrovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s-type protein aggregation.
HistoAge represents a groundbreaking advance in assessing aging and neurodegeneration in human samples, offering an unbiased and robust metric for studying cellular changes underlying degenerative diseases. The researchers anticipate building a multicenter collaboration to develop a vast AI-ready dataset, facilitating the creation of even more powerful AI models that could revolutionize our understanding of brain diseases. Mount Sinai’s experts express enthusiasm about AI’s disruptive influence on brain research, propelling them toward the next generation of cures and unlocking crucial causal aspects of debilitating brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The HistoAge model and similar AI-powered tools are set to transform the landscape of brain research and disease understanding, promising a brighter future for diagnostics and treatments.
