“Debbie, have you seen my keys?”

We all ask questions like that. In an active life, it’s easy to lose track of things when we’re distracted, in a hurry, or in multi-tasking overload.

But mild forgetfulness, when it appears to be progressive, can have a different meaning for people in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. It may stem from a variety of causes, including stress; but it can also be an early indicator of Alzheimer's disease (AD) or less common neurological problems. This sums up the challenge facing neurologists when they see a patient with what is known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). How can they diagnose AD with a high degree of certainty in the early stages – when it may still be possible to arrest it?

Professor James Brewer of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) is doing groundbreaking work with a Mac-based diagnostic system known as NeuroQuant that automates analysis of magnetic resonance (MRI) images of the brain. He is the first physician to use this technology on a clinical basis to examine patients’ brains for the tell-tale effects of Alzheimer's disease.

“Diagnosing Alzheimer’s may be helped by taking volume measurements of regions of the brain,” says Brewer. “The old way of doing this is unbelievably painstaking. The MRI is 256 slices with 256x256 resolution, so every voxel is about a millimeter in each direction. One used to have to flip through the MRI slice by slice and trace the hippocampi and other brain regions on each slice using a program called Amira. That could take even an expert neuroanatomist 100 hours.

”Now I have a beautiful setup. The iMac sits on my desk and runs NeuroQuant, which processes an MRI and delivers a quantitative analysis of the entire brain structure in less than 10 minutes. This is a simple, powerful arrangement for doing both research and clinical practice.”

Brewer’s work will be of intense interest to clinical neurologists – and to anyone whose loved one is facing memory

loss.