Scan software

is claiming a breakthrough in medical diagnostics after interpreting positron emission tomography (PET) brain scan images to identify various forms of dementia.

The Hamburg-based project is claimed to enhance one of the most effective techniques, called FDG-PET, for diagnosing early-stage dementia, which is performed using a PET brain scan with the tracer fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG).

It arose from work involving Philips and doctors at the

, who had observed that while FDG-PET images give high-grade diagnostic information, clinicians need considerable expertise in nuclear medicine imagery and brain anatomy to interpret them.

In an attempt to help, Philips researchers combined their capabilities in decision support software, imaging technology and image analysis software.

Philips scientist Stewart Young said: 'The system contains a database of scans of people with healthy brains, and patients with particular verified diseases — Alzheimer's, frontotemporal dementia or Lewy body dementia. Following a scan, the software compares the patient's image to this database by aligning the images, then computing a simple set of numbers which indicates the similarity of patterns in the patient's brain to the patterns in the database.'