Translating digital and AI advances into brain health outcomes
The potential of digital tools and AI to accelerate prevention, diagnosis, and treatment cannot be overstated. A new Policy Brief from NeuroCentury, European Policy Centre and Brain Capital Alliance presents a range of recommendations for a step-change in how digital and AI-based tools move towards scalable, interoperable and clinically validated solutions embedded in routine care and research workflows. Entitled “Translating digital and AI advances into brain health outcomes” and co-authored by Paweł Świeboda and Elizabeth Kuiper, the publication argues that brain research and brain health stand out as critical testbeds for an AI health ecosystem, or AI vertical.
Brain conditions are highly heterogenous, involve multi-dimensional symptoms, and are managed through fragmented clinical pathways. This means that the case is strong for a sector-specific ecosystem encompassing data infrastructure, regulatory alignment, special compute capacity, talent, investment, and large-scale deployment. Encouragingly, AI is already making tangible contributions - from early detection of Alzheimer’s disease and automated lesion quantification in Multiple Sclerosis, to digital biomarkers in depression and movement disorders, speech-based detection of cognitive decline, and virtual brain models. Scaling these advances will be a defining challenge – and opportunity – for Europe.
Urgent attention is needed to see improvements in the quality of insights generated from data - requiring progress along the critical axes of data integration: data phenotyping, longitudinal data collection, multimodal integration, and the harmonization, standardization and interoperability to support robust analysis. Prospective, deeply phenotyped data, where multiple data modalities are collected from the same patient over the same time period, are essential. Without this, AI is forced to work on fragmented and inconsistent datasets, limiting its ability to detect biologically meaningful correlations. Data must therefore be generated, curated, and harmonized in ways that support regulatory evaluation and decision-making. Equally important is trust. It cannot be assumed; it must be earned through clear societal value proposition.
The Policy Brief draws on the Round Table on “The Future of Brain Health in the Digital and AI Era” and the insights of our speakers and participants, including Niklas Blomberg, Ulf Nehrbass, Rachel Fellner, Marco Salvetti, Ira Haraldsen, Anca Scortariu, Robert Lugowski, Emre Ozcan and Rym Ayadi. We are grateful to Merck for supporting the project.