Dementia AI tools will face independent testing under a five-year, $25M program the National Institute on Aging has awarded to UCLA Health. The money funds a national center for validating software used to diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions.
The program, called APEX-ADRD, will test and validate AI software used to diagnose and treat neurodegenerative disorders. Mayo Clinic and the University of Wisconsin are partners.
More than 7.2 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s, a figure expected to climb in the coming decades. The program’s leaders argue the field now has plenty of promising tools and too little independent evidence about whether they help.
Dr. John N. Mafi, a co-director of the program, argues that patients with dementia stand to win or lose more from AI than any other group. He wants the effort to bring scrutiny to every stage of a tool’s life cycle, starting with the data it trains on and ending with its behavior in real care.
Dr. Joann Elmore, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, argues the field needs proof rather than promise. She said the measure of any tool is whether it improves care for patients and families.
Reach is the other distinguishing feature. The team will evaluate tools across California’s diverse population, pair them with one of the country’s largest secure health system datasets spanning the University of California, and share its evaluation frameworks and safety monitoring standards through the NIA network.
Alex Bui, a professor of radiological sciences, bioengineering and bioinformatics, is also a collaborating investigator.
