Barcelona hospital utilizes new AI tool to personalize MS treatment

The University Hospital of Bellvitge (HUB) has started to use a groundbreaking artificial intelligence tool to improve the diagnosis and personalize the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS).

The 'icobrain' tool lets doctors quantify specific brain structures and can detect new brain lesions with unprecedented precision.

In addition, it can offer advancements in the analysis of magnetic resonances, and can more easily detect patients with uncontrolled MS, with a poor prognosis, or with a suboptimal response to treatment.

The project, carried out by Bellvitge in collaboration with Novartis and Icometrix, makes the Barcelona hospital the first in Spain to implement the 'icobrain' tool in regular clinical practice.

'Icobrain' also provides a better brain scans and can help monitor the disease, even detecting subtle changes that occur before the progression and development of disability, as explained by the hospital.

"AI can be of particular interest in the neuroimaging assessment of MS, improving diagnostic accuracy and offering precise quantitative biomarkers that allow less subjective communication between doctors," explains Dr. Pablo Naval-Baudin, neuroradiologist at the Service of Diagnosis by Image of the Bellvitge Hospital.

The project has an initial duration of one year and is expected to benefit a large number of patients. The Bellvitge hospital treats one out of every nine MS patients in Catalonia.

"This tool will help us to improve the monitoring of our patients, allowing an objective quantification of the changes in the resonance to more accurately assess the response to the treatment," Dr. Antoni Martínez-Yélamos, head of the Neurology Service of the HUB, assures.

The 'icobrain' tool has been in use in hospitals in Belgium and the United States for more than ten years, and has gathered more than 100,000 collections of analyzed diagnostic imaging data.