AI Shows Early Promise in Detecting Infantile Spasms

January 17, 2025

Article Published by Medscape Medical News

Artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of caregiver-recorded videos has the potential to diagnose infantile epileptic spasm syndrome, according to a new study. In Infants with the condition even small delays in diagnosis and ensuing treatment can result in poor outcomes including intellectual disability, autism, and worse epilepsy.

“It’s super important to start the treatment early, but oftentimes, these symptoms are just misrecognized by primary care or emergency room physicians. It takes a long time to diagnose,” said Gadi Miron, MD, who presented the study at the 2024 American Epilepsy Society (AES) Annual Meeting.

Parents who observe unusual behavior often seek advice from friends and family members and receive false reassurance that such behavior isn’t unusual. Even physicians may contribute if they are unaware of this rare syndrome. “The timing and frequency of these spasms create challenges for diagnosis. They only last about 1 second, and they tend to cluster in the morning. By the time a caregiver brings an infant to a healthcare provider, they may have trouble describing the behavior. “Parents are struggling to describe what they saw, and it often just does not resonate, or doesn’t make the healthcare provider think about infantile spasms,” said Shaun Hussain, MD.

The idea to employ AI came from looking at videos of infants on YouTube and the realization that many patients upload them in an effort to seek advice. “So many parents upload these videos and ask in the comments, ‘What is this? What should I do? Can somebody help me?’ said Miron, who is a neurologist and researcher at Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

The researchers built a model that they trained to recognize infantile spasms using openly available YouTube videos, including 141 infants, 991 recorded seizures, and 597 non-seizure video segments, along with a non-seizure cohort of 127 infants with an accompanying 1385 video segments. The group is now developing an app that will allow parents to upload videos that can be analyzed using the model. Physicians can then view the video and determine if there is suspicion of a seizure.

Miron also believes that this approach could find use in other types of seizures and populations, including older children and adults. “We have actually built some models for detection of seizures for videos in adults as well. Looking more towards the future, I’m sure AI will be used to analyze videos of other neurological disorders with motor symptoms [such as] movement disorders and gait,” he said.

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