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NeuroScience Associates and Aiforia Technologies Partner to Enhance ALS Research

Company news Diagnostics and preclinical

NeuroScience Associates (NSA Labs) and Aiforia are bringing together their respective expertise in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI).

BOSTON, Feb. 24, 2020 – Aiforia Technologies, an expert provider of AI solutions for image analysis, and NeuroScience Associates (NSA Labs®), a leading authority in neurohistology services, announced today a collaboration to uncover the pathophysiology behind amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease.

This project is inspired by the donation of the entire brain and spinal column of a friend of an NSA employee who died from ALS. The donation could become an unprecedented resource for researching ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.

NSA will use this donation to create a whole-brain reference dataset for ALS: a unique resource for studying the disease. As a leading authority of central nervous system histology, NSA has comprehensive resources, and the technical capabilities and skills to prepare an entire, intact human brain hemisphere for research. But they needed much more powerful tools to support the analysis of the brain.

“The artificial intelligence-powered platform from Aiforia enables us to view and analyze the brain in ways that we were not able to before,” said Britt Massei, CEO and CFO at NSA Labs. “The Aiforia platform also allows us to store and manage the incredibly complex and large images produced from the brain samples.”

Just one individual image file in this project contains more information than 5,000 pictures taken with the latest iPhone. This requires a platform robust enough to support such high capacities. Aiforia’s cloud technology also provides the possibility for global distribution of this valuable information on ALS, enabling wide-scale collaboration.

“Aiforia’s mission is to provide global access to AI-powered image analysis directly to pathologists, scientists and healthcare professionals to enable them to make new discoveries and to understand disease mechanisms better,” said Kaisa Helminen, CEO of Aiforia. “The NSA Labs project aims to shed light on this devastating disease and we are proud to help NSA on their journey to discovery.”

To learn more, please visit www.aiforia.com and www.neuroscienceassociates.com.

Learn more about Aiforia here.