Digital Healthcare Platform for Early Dementia Diagnosis

Most of the 700,000 people in the UK with dementia have not received a formal diagnosis, so are denied access to benefitial treatments. The current NHS approach is slow (often more than 12 months) and often of low quality. This project will develop a novel digital healthcare system that will allow dementia diagnoses to be made quickly, cost effectively, and earlier in the diease course. It makes a novel combination of computer-based tests of memory and thinking and computerized analysis of MRI brain scans, which have been used in research for several years. It will provide support in diagnosis, making available the quality of information currently only available in highly specialist centres to doctors treating all patients, with the aim of reducing time to diagnosis to 3 months. We will build and test a prototype and demonstrate its value before developing a refined prototype that can be rolled-out nationally.