A software designed to process images taken by satellites has been adapted to be used in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. This new software, called AlzTools 3D Slicer, was created by a team of Elecnor Deimos in Spain, a company that operates in several fields of advanced technology. Developers have taken advantage of years of experience in developing software on behalf of ESA’s Envisat satellite mission.
The Envisat (Environmental Satellite) satellite was one of the largest and most advanced satellites for environmental monitoring. Launched on March 1, 2002 for a mission which was due to last five years, it worked for almost exactly 10 years. On April 12, 2012, ESA has lost contact with Envisat and on May 9, 2012 its mission has been declared closed because the attempts to reestablish contact failed.
The processing of the huge amount of images sent by the Envisat satellite required a specialized software. Carlos Fernández de la Peña of Elecnor Deimos explained that to select a part of an image you need to have routines that can extract the information from it to determine for example if a pixel is a field or a road. Developers who have worked for ESA have accumulated a wealth of experience in processing raw images identifying specific items.
Carlos Fernández de la Peña pointed out the similarities between satellite images and medical scans such as MRI. This is another case where it’s necessary to identify specific details that in a medical examination may be an indication of a disease such as Alzheimer’s disease.
To adapt the techniques developed for the analysis of satellite images to medical needs, developers have worked closely with specialists of the Technical University of Madrid, also known as Polytechnic University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid or UPM). The software AlzTools 3D Slicer is now being used at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha UCLM) in Albacete, Spain, for research on Alzheimer’s disease.
So far, doctors have diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease by examining the patients’ brain scans with the naked eye. However, this skill requires a long training to learn how to recognize the symptoms of the disease when it’s still in its early stages. This new software could at least partly automate the diagnosis, one of the many ways in which space technologies help medicine in unforeseen ways.
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