Artificial intelligence technology is now able to accurately detect distinct variations in how male and female brains are organized at the cellular level.
New research published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports on Tuesday highlighted that white matter is distributed differently within the skulls of men and women. It is found within the brain’s deep tissues and is essential for communication among its different parts.
The investigation was completed by New York University (NYU) Langone Health in Manhattan. The medical centre obtained its findings by using machine learning programs to analyze hundreds of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.
Researchers from NYU Langone say the program has a 95 per cent level of accuracy. It was able to detect structural complexities that are not visible to the human eye. They validated their discoveries with three different AI models.
“Our findings provide a clearer picture of how a living, human brain is structured,” neuroradiologist and study author Yvonne Lui said, “which may offer new insight into how many psychiatric and neurological disorders develop and why they can present differently in men and women.”
Studies like this are particularly relevant when considering potential treatments for brain diseases and conditions present in males and females. Therapy methods that are efficacious for men might be less impactful for women and vice versa.
“If, as has been historically the case, men are used as a standard model for various disorders, researchers may miss out on critical insight,” study co-lead Vara Lakshmi Bayanagari said.
The National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Defense funded the initiative.
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Other researchers disagree, say brain is indistinguishable among genders
According to other credible scholars, the human brain is monomorphic.
“The differences between human male and female brains are so subtle, they could never be called dimorphic,” neuroscientist Lise Eliot said in a recent documentary from The Nature of Things. “They could never be called two shapes.”
She claims that just like other human organs, there is only one type of brain in men and women.
However, some organizations like Stanford Medicine concur with NYU Langone and think there are distinct characteristics. The renowned medical school also used AI to make its determination.
“Sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in ageing and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders,” Stanford psychiatry professor Vinod Menon said.
Using AI to study nature in ways that were not previously possible has become a growing trend in recent days. Certain early-stage companies like VERSES AI Inc. (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQB: VRSSF) have taken the lead in this regard.
Verses has a diverse research team that has been developing and fine-tuning an innovative AI program called Genius. It learns by examining biological processes instead of conventional data sets.
Verses AI is a sponsor of Mugglehead news coverage
rowan@mugglehead.com
