KNUST Researcher investigates how AI can improve brain scan analysis

How well can artificial intelligence developed using medical data from Europe and North America analyse brain scans from Ghanaian patients? This question took Ghanaian biomedical engineer Dr Prince Ebenezer Adjei to the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, where he worked with researchers to investigate how medical imaging AI tools perform on Ghanaian clinical scans. Dr Adjei, who leads the Global Health AI Lab (GHAiC-K) at the Global Health and Infectious Diseases Group of the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (GHID-KCCR), has returned from the research visit with early findings that could inform the development of medical AI tools for Ghanaian healthcare. Working with colleagues at DKFZ, he used approximately 1,600 unlabelled head CT scans from Ghana for further training of AI models through a method known as self-supervised learning. This allows models to learn patterns from medical images without requiring specialists to manually label every scan. The work involved nnFoundation, one of DKFZ's newer medical imaging AI tools, and nnU-Net, an established framework developed at the same institution. The researchers tested the approaches on tasks including identifying areas of brain damage caused by acute stroke and estimating a person's brain age.