System for detecting symptoms, determining staging and gauging drug efficacy in cases of Parkinson's disease

摘要

A system for using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for detecting symptoms indicative of Parkinson's disease, diagnosing Parkinson's disease and gauging the efficacy of medications used in treating Parkinson's disease. The system includes process steps involving activating a selected region of the brain which may be affected by Parkinson's disease using a delayed response motor sequence type task, concurrently acquiring task-active MRI data responsive to the task, comparing the patient's task-active MRI data to reference data derived from a database of task-active data from healthy individuals and detecting whether the patient has symptoms related to Parkinson's disease. The severity of the patient's symptoms and the staging of the disease may also be determined. Also, a medication may be administered to the patient and the efficacy of the medication may gauged based on the severity of the patient's symptoms on and off of medication.