TOKYO, April 13, 2022 —FUJIFILM Corporation (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO, Representative Director: Teiichi Goto) and National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry (location: Kodaira City, Tokyo; President: Kazuyuki Nakagome) announce positive study results of Fujifilm’s new AI technology (hereinafter “AI Technology for AD Progression Prediction”) to predict whether patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) will progress to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) within two years. The AI Technology for AD Progression Prediction*1 has an 88%*2 accuracy rate, which was published*3 on April 12 in npj Digital Medicine, a high quality Nature Portfolio journal.

The AI Technology for AD Progression Prediction was developed by Fujifilm based on its advanced image recognition technologies and machine learning expertise.

Following the successful study results, Fujifilm and the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry will further verify the technology, with the aim of applying it to a stratification of patients in clinical trials for treatment of AD.
Background
There are currently about 55 million dementia patients throughout the world. Moreover, as the population ages, the number is predicted to increase to approximately 139 million by the year 2050. AD, which is a type of dementia, is the most common cause of dementia, and this trend is predicted to continue.

In the development of new drugs for AD in recent years, many clinical trials of MCI patients have been conducted to observe amyloid-β presence, which is the major causal substance of AD and begins accumulating prior to onset of AD. However, most clinical trials have not been successful, and it is difficult to prove statistically significant differences. One of the reasons is that the percentage of patients who progress from MCI to AD within two years is less than 20%*5 and many MCI patients remain unchanged even if they receive placebo. Under these circumstances, Fujifilm and National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry believes that the AI Technology for AD Progression Prediction would address the issue and contribute to evaluate the efficacy of drug candidates accurately.

Content of research
Numerous research has been reported in recent years indicating that the accuracy of image recognition is enhanced by deep learning technology. In addition, accurate predictions require a large dataset of images, however the open database of NA-ADNI*6, the world’s largest AD research project, only has images of about 1,000 MCI patients. Generally, establishing deep learning technology requires over 10 million images in the research of object recognition. To overcome this limitation, Fujifilm built AI Technology for AD Progression Prediction, by targeting specific areas inside the brain that are strongly correlated with the progression of AD.

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