We’ve heard a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and some of it is unsettling. But AI also has great potential to improve and even save lives.

Mohamad Habes, PhD, is an assistant professor of radiology at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio and director of the Biggs Institute neuroimaging core.

“In my lab, we are developing tools that quantify lesions in the brain. Pathological changes like small vessel disease lesions,” he said. “These lesions have been associated with stroke, and they have been also associated with vascular cognitive impairment.”

These lesions are tiny. In older people, there can be so many of them that it’s difficult for human beings to count and categorize them.

“So we train deep learning algorithms to detect these lesions, automatically count them and give a precise location for every single lesion,” Habes said.

They can do it in seconds. So before you leave the doctor’s office they can tell you if, by that measure, you’re at risk for a stroke — and then you can have a conversation about interventions that might prevent it.

“Once a stroke happens, it will be more difficult to intervene,” he said. “So there is a sweet spot where intervention would be great in managing the disease.”

Habes is also using the tool to learn more about brain lesions, why they happen and their overall impact on brain health.

Learn more about brain research and other discoveries aimed at curing diseases atAdvancingBrainHealth.org.  

Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, about how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.