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Owen Phillips: The future of 3D brain scans visualisation (interview)
What is the history of BrainKey development and how could 3D brain scans be used in the future?
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Dr. Owen Phillips is a a neuroscientist and a founder and CEO of BrainKey, an AI and neuroscience startup developing a platform to help patients manage their brain health. In this interview, our medical writer Ehab Naim discussed with Dr. Phillips the history of BrainKey development and how 3D brain scans could be used in the future.
Ehab Naim (E.N.): From the idea to reality, what is BrainKey, and how did it emerge?
Owen Phillips (O.P.): I came out of Stanford University. I was doing my postdoc and got into AI and the potential for neuroscience and understanding the human brain. That's where this idea came out: "okay, let's take what we're learning, the exploding field of neuroscience, there's so much new knowledge coming out, and let's bring this directly to patients. Let's bring it directly to the physicians to understand the brain like never before and really track it in a way that's never been possible before". So, in this example:
(shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization)
Image 2
I'm actually showing what our product looks like. Here we've got the hippocampus, a structure involved in learning and memory. If you want to recall memories of your kids, recall these things you learned back in University, you need to reference this structure of your brain. And what we have here is we quantify its size, we've taken that from an MRI image, and we've been able to track it at three separate time points for this patient. We're understanding how it's changing across time for this patient, and we're able to do this with these different structures as well.
(shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization)
Image 3
Here I'm showing the frontal lobe of the brain. You can see in this light blue area that your brain just will change over time normally. What's exciting here is that we get to understand if you are changing in a normal way or if there might be something else going on. This opens up the door for optimization and longevity, but also early identification if there are potential neurogenerative diseases or other things that might be happening.
E.N.: What can we learn from our existing MRI scans if you can tell us?
O.P.: There's so much! We can take an MRI scan, apply sophisticated AI models, and we're able to reconstruct the brain in 3D, and quantify these different structures. (shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization). Here I've pulled out the frontal lobe, and the frontal lobe is involved in executive functioning. All these high-level thoughts you have are really going to involve your frontal lobe. So, what we can do with the MRI image, a structural MRI image, in this case, is we can quantify its size, how big that is, and track how it's changing over time. Essentially, what we're doing on more of a cellular level is we're adding up how much gray matter you have, so the density of the neurons, and quantifying that at a macro level. Thanks to that, you can get a better idea of what your brain health looks like. MRI is useful for both this kind of really nice quantifications of your brain health and an overall picture of your brain health. But then, of course, it's also super useful for things like tumor detection, and aneurysm detection as well. You can understand if you do have any tumors that are detected, and you can also get a quantification of these various structures in your brain.
E.N.: You provide brain tracking over time. How can this information be used? Could you give us live examples?
O.P.: Let me pull up the hippocampus again. (shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization). That's the structure involved in learning and memory. If you're a high-functioning executive, you need optimal hippocampus while remembering people's names. It is going to be used all the time, so you can track how it's changing over time. If you were trying to optimize your brain health, now you've got it at your fingertips to really track it. What is impacting the physical structure of my brain? Is my hippocampus deteriorating? If I was taking some sort of therapeutic, I would want to know, is this working for me, or is my brain degenerating at an even faster rate? These are the type of insights that we now make possible to understand. You can get an idea of, should I be taking some sort of therapeutic? If you're at risk for dementia or maybe have some sort of neurodegenerative disease, then an MRI can help you differentiate what's the correct diagnosis. Then it can be used to track how a therapeutic is working for a patient. In these large pharmaceutical studies for new Alzheimer's drugs, MRI imaging is used as a biomarker to track the effect of these drugs. Hippocampal volume is used for these new drugs to see if it's impacting the physical structure here.
E.N.: What kind of customers does BrainKey service?
O.P.: We've got a wide variety of customers. They're curious people. Everybody's got a brain. But it's one thing to see a brain in a textbook and it's another thing to see your own brain up on the screen and know that's your brain. We can even 3D print your brain, which is so cool if you like these kinds of nerdy things.
Image 4
But I do. I love that. And a lot of our customers do. Even people that you wouldn't think would respond to this type of thing now have one of these 3D printed brains up, on their bookcase. I was at a friend's house, and they had theirs printed from our company, and it was above their fireplace. Things like that, bringing the brain directly to a patient, and giving all of this detailed information to a physician have been so helpful for them to understand what's happening. To understand what I should be doing to maintain my brain health and be able to track that going forward. It has been really exciting and motivating for these patients. The typical patient can be an executive looking for optimization, but it can also be a patient at risk for neurodegenerative disease or maybe has a family history of neurodegenerative disease looking to understand what's the best pharmacology for them.
E.N.: It directs me to my next question. You mentioned lots of details regarding the brain. So how can clinicians utilize your services daily in their practice, for example, in diagnosis?
O.P.: That's a great question. When you get a brain scan, there's so much information there. You tend to get a radiology report written in highly technical language. That's been a huge issue for patients and physicians who are not super familiar with radiology terminology. What we do is we bring it down into this 3D way; we're putting it at your fingertips, this is the patient's actual brain. Instead of being this abstract technical thing, it's something they can really see and interact with. Just at that base level, this visualization and interaction make it so much easier for them to grasp that this is an important thing that's happening. Maybe this is something I really care about, and I want to do something about it. A brute force visualization is a really nice value to add. Then it was understanding all that information. Now we break it down into this simple graph so you can just see it right here. It's easy for you to get a quick visualization. Again, you don't need to dive into the super technical language to understand what's happening. It's just right there at your fingertips.
The other big thing is that we have an algorithm called Brain Age. We'll take in all of this information and condense it into one value - your brain age. So, you can have your chronological age, say 50, but your brain age might be 45, or maybe it's 55. The big thing there for you as a physician is that now you have this overall perspective on the patient's brain in 1 second. And not only do you have that in 1 second, but you also can communicate it to the patient very easily. This is your brain age. And because your brain age is this age, certain things might be good for you to be thinking about. Maybe it's this specific treatment recommendation based on your brain age and all these other metrics that are now just right there at your fingertips.
E.N.: With AI and machine learning in mind, what is the most demanding challenge regarding technology?
O.P.: That's a great question. To show up that visualization - it's not trivial. So that's why nobody's built something like this in the past. There's a whole host of technologies to be able just to make this very easy and simple for you to interact with. The way we think about this is similar to maybe an Apple product where you want it to be so simple. So basic that people don't even think about the intense technology behind the scenes to make this possible. We've got AI algorithms, we are doing intensive computing on these very large medical images to reproduce this, and we could get this back to the patients very quickly. After getting an MRI scan, we can get this report back to them within an hour. As far as we know, there's nothing else like this. All these things we do on the technological side, to be able to interact with that 3D visualization in a web format are not easy. But we do all that so that it's all very simple and right there at your fingertips. Hopefully, you don't even have to realize how much technology is behind this.
E.N.: To reach this point, you must have worked with many datasets. How large are they, and how do you obtain them?
O.P.: That's a huge point. We get data from patients all over the world. We worked with various clinics. We've built up this highly curated dataset to produce that 3D visualization. We've been hand inspecting and annotating these brain scans to ensure that segmentation. When I showed that hippocampal volume there; that was based on us training a model. Essentially we're training a computer to take an MRI image and understand that that's the hippocampus. This small structure on that image is the left hippocampus, and that small structure on the right is the right hippocampus, and I need to understand that border perfectly. We've put in a ton of work to take these various images from all over the world and be able to do that. That's where a lot of the technology and an effort has gone into. That's important to us if you want actually to track small changes in your brain. For example, suppose you were targeting the hippocampus for learning and memory. In that case, you might be taking a therapeutic or really intensive exercise program or some program that the physician has developed for the patient. You want to be able to track small changes in the structures, and that's something we worked very hard at. To make sure every minute change of this structure is tracked precisely.
E.N.: You have seen the company growing with time. What's your most proud achievement with BrainKey?
O.P.: That's a good question. I love having conversations like this and getting to work with clinics all over the world. The longevity movement is so exciting right now. Flipping from what I used to think of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to now when we can think of things a little bit conceptually different. Now we can target age and optimize brain health, so the patients live longer and longer. It's not enough to just keep them alive. We want them to have a fantastic life and optimal brain health because you want to remember your kids' names and know your grandkids' names. You want to remember their birthdays and have a great experience with them. This is so important to being human. That's what BrainKey is fundamentally about: getting this type of information into your hands and into the hands of your physician so you can have these experiences and can live that life that you want to live. I am so proud of being able to take a step in that direction. I think it's going to get so much better over the next five or ten years. You know, ask me again in five years, and we'll see what I am proud of. But it's great to get to this point.
E.N. You mentioned 5 and 10 years period. Can you give us a hint about your plans and where you see BrainKey going?
O.P.: The precision recommendation - so understanding exactly what's right for you as a patient and as a physician treating a patient. That's we're going to continue to improve on. Neurology, psychiatry, and mental issues have been many blunt force approaches in both understanding and treatment. We're just going to get more and more refined. We're making progress here, but the pharmacology companies are also working to develop new therapeutics. Longevity companies are working to develop therapeutics. Various companies make things to engage patients, such as new exercise programs. We're working to incorporate all of that to give you more options and understand which options are the best for which patient. I think that's going to be huge. It's going from "You've got some memory issues? There's not much we can do for you" to "We are detecting some changes in your brain before you developed memory issues. These specific changes respond best to X pharmaceutical and Y exercise programs." That's where we're going with this, and that is going to be amazing to help patients.
E.N.: Thank you very much for your time and knowledge, Dr. Phillips. It was our pleasure.
O.P.: This was great. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for listening.
If you want to learn more about BrainKey or would like to get your MRI scans tested, visit https://www.brainkey.ai/.
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Dr. Owen Phillips is a a neuroscientist and a founder and CEO of BrainKey, an AI and neuroscience startup developing a platform to help patients manage their brain health. In this interview, our medical writer Ehab Naim discussed with Dr. Phillips the history of BrainKey development and how 3D brain scans could be used in the future.
Ehab Naim (E.N.): From the idea to reality, what is BrainKey, and how did it emerge?
Owen Phillips (O.P.): I came out of Stanford University. I was doing my postdoc and got into AI and the potential for neuroscience and understanding the human brain. That's where this idea came out: "okay, let's take what we're learning, the exploding field of neuroscience, there's so much new knowledge coming out, and let's bring this directly to patients. Let's bring it directly to the physicians to understand the brain like never before and really track it in a way that's never been possible before". So, in this example:
(shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization)
Image 2
I'm actually showing what our product looks like. Here we've got the hippocampus, a structure involved in learning and memory. If you want to recall memories of your kids, recall these things you learned back in University, you need to reference this structure of your brain. And what we have here is we quantify its size, we've taken that from an MRI image, and we've been able to track it at three separate time points for this patient. We're understanding how it's changing across time for this patient, and we're able to do this with these different structures as well.
(shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization)
Image 3
Here I'm showing the frontal lobe of the brain. You can see in this light blue area that your brain just will change over time normally. What's exciting here is that we get to understand if you are changing in a normal way or if there might be something else going on. This opens up the door for optimization and longevity, but also early identification if there are potential neurogenerative diseases or other things that might be happening.
E.N.: What can we learn from our existing MRI scans if you can tell us?
O.P.: There's so much! We can take an MRI scan, apply sophisticated AI models, and we're able to reconstruct the brain in 3D, and quantify these different structures. (shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization). Here I've pulled out the frontal lobe, and the frontal lobe is involved in executive functioning. All these high-level thoughts you have are really going to involve your frontal lobe. So, what we can do with the MRI image, a structural MRI image, in this case, is we can quantify its size, how big that is, and track how it's changing over time. Essentially, what we're doing on more of a cellular level is we're adding up how much gray matter you have, so the density of the neurons, and quantifying that at a macro level. Thanks to that, you can get a better idea of what your brain health looks like. MRI is useful for both this kind of really nice quantifications of your brain health and an overall picture of your brain health. But then, of course, it's also super useful for things like tumor detection, and aneurysm detection as well. You can understand if you do have any tumors that are detected, and you can also get a quantification of these various structures in your brain.
E.N.: You provide brain tracking over time. How can this information be used? Could you give us live examples?
O.P.: Let me pull up the hippocampus again. (shows the 3D model of the brain from BrainKey visualization). That's the structure involved in learning and memory. If you're a high-functioning executive, you need optimal hippocampus while remembering people's names. It is going to be used all the time, so you can track how it's changing over time. If you were trying to optimize your brain health, now you've got it at your fingertips to really track it. What is impacting the physical structure of my brain? Is my hippocampus deteriorating? If I was taking some sort of therapeutic, I would want to know, is this working for me, or is my brain degenerating at an even faster rate? These are the type of insights that we now make possible to understand. You can get an idea of, should I be taking some sort of therapeutic? If you're at risk for dementia or maybe have some sort of neurodegenerative disease, then an MRI can help you differentiate what's the correct diagnosis. Then it can be used to track how a therapeutic is working for a patient. In these large pharmaceutical studies for new Alzheimer's drugs, MRI imaging is used as a biomarker to track the effect of these drugs. Hippocampal volume is used for these new drugs to see if it's impacting the physical structure here.
E.N.: What kind of customers does BrainKey service?
O.P.: We've got a wide variety of customers. They're curious people. Everybody's got a brain. But it's one thing to see a brain in a textbook and it's another thing to see your own brain up on the screen and know that's your brain. We can even 3D print your brain, which is so cool if you like these kinds of nerdy things.
Image 4
But I do. I love that. And a lot of our customers do. Even people that you wouldn't think would respond to this type of thing now have one of these 3D printed brains up, on their bookcase. I was at a friend's house, and they had theirs printed from our company, and it was above their fireplace. Things like that, bringing the brain directly to a patient, and giving all of this detailed information to a physician have been so helpful for them to understand what's happening. To understand what I should be doing to maintain my brain health and be able to track that going forward. It has been really exciting and motivating for these patients. The typical patient can be an executive looking for optimization, but it can also be a patient at risk for neurodegenerative disease or maybe has a family history of neurodegenerative disease looking to understand what's the best pharmacology for them.
E.N.: It directs me to my next question. You mentioned lots of details regarding the brain. So how can clinicians utilize your services daily in their practice, for example, in diagnosis?
O.P.: That's a great question. When you get a brain scan, there's so much information there. You tend to get a radiology report written in highly technical language. That's been a huge issue for patients and physicians who are not super familiar with radiology terminology. What we do is we bring it down into this 3D way; we're putting it at your fingertips, this is the patient's actual brain. Instead of being this abstract technical thing, it's something they can really see and interact with. Just at that base level, this visualization and interaction make it so much easier for them to grasp that this is an important thing that's happening. Maybe this is something I really care about, and I want to do something about it. A brute force visualization is a really nice value to add. Then it was understanding all that information. Now we break it down into this simple graph so you can just see it right here. It's easy for you to get a quick visualization. Again, you don't need to dive into the super technical language to understand what's happening. It's just right there at your fingertips.
The other big thing is that we have an algorithm called Brain Age. We'll take in all of this information and condense it into one value - your brain age. So, you can have your chronological age, say 50, but your brain age might be 45, or maybe it's 55. The big thing there for you as a physician is that now you have this overall perspective on the patient's brain in 1 second. And not only do you have that in 1 second, but you also can communicate it to the patient very easily. This is your brain age. And because your brain age is this age, certain things might be good for you to be thinking about. Maybe it's this specific treatment recommendation based on your brain age and all these other metrics that are now just right there at your fingertips.
E.N.: With AI and machine learning in mind, what is the most demanding challenge regarding technology?
O.P.: That's a great question. To show up that visualization - it's not trivial. So that's why nobody's built something like this in the past. There's a whole host of technologies to be able just to make this very easy and simple for you to interact with. The way we think about this is similar to maybe an Apple product where you want it to be so simple. So basic that people don't even think about the intense technology behind the scenes to make this possible. We've got AI algorithms, we are doing intensive computing on these very large medical images to reproduce this, and we could get this back to the patients very quickly. After getting an MRI scan, we can get this report back to them within an hour. As far as we know, there's nothing else like this. All these things we do on the technological side, to be able to interact with that 3D visualization in a web format are not easy. But we do all that so that it's all very simple and right there at your fingertips. Hopefully, you don't even have to realize how much technology is behind this.
E.N.: To reach this point, you must have worked with many datasets. How large are they, and how do you obtain them?
O.P.: That's a huge point. We get data from patients all over the world. We worked with various clinics. We've built up this highly curated dataset to produce that 3D visualization. We've been hand inspecting and annotating these brain scans to ensure that segmentation. When I showed that hippocampal volume there; that was based on us training a model. Essentially we're training a computer to take an MRI image and understand that that's the hippocampus. This small structure on that image is the left hippocampus, and that small structure on the right is the right hippocampus, and I need to understand that border perfectly. We've put in a ton of work to take these various images from all over the world and be able to do that. That's where a lot of the technology and an effort has gone into. That's important to us if you want actually to track small changes in your brain. For example, suppose you were targeting the hippocampus for learning and memory. In that case, you might be taking a therapeutic or really intensive exercise program or some program that the physician has developed for the patient. You want to be able to track small changes in the structures, and that's something we worked very hard at. To make sure every minute change of this structure is tracked precisely.
E.N.: You have seen the company growing with time. What's your most proud achievement with BrainKey?
O.P.: That's a good question. I love having conversations like this and getting to work with clinics all over the world. The longevity movement is so exciting right now. Flipping from what I used to think of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to now when we can think of things a little bit conceptually different. Now we can target age and optimize brain health, so the patients live longer and longer. It's not enough to just keep them alive. We want them to have a fantastic life and optimal brain health because you want to remember your kids' names and know your grandkids' names. You want to remember their birthdays and have a great experience with them. This is so important to being human. That's what BrainKey is fundamentally about: getting this type of information into your hands and into the hands of your physician so you can have these experiences and can live that life that you want to live. I am so proud of being able to take a step in that direction. I think it's going to get so much better over the next five or ten years. You know, ask me again in five years, and we'll see what I am proud of. But it's great to get to this point.
E.N. You mentioned 5 and 10 years period. Can you give us a hint about your plans and where you see BrainKey going?
O.P.: The precision recommendation - so understanding exactly what's right for you as a patient and as a physician treating a patient. That's we're going to continue to improve on. Neurology, psychiatry, and mental issues have been many blunt force approaches in both understanding and treatment. We're just going to get more and more refined. We're making progress here, but the pharmacology companies are also working to develop new therapeutics. Longevity companies are working to develop therapeutics. Various companies make things to engage patients, such as new exercise programs. We're working to incorporate all of that to give you more options and understand which options are the best for which patient. I think that's going to be huge. It's going from "You've got some memory issues? There's not much we can do for you" to "We are detecting some changes in your brain before you developed memory issues. These specific changes respond best to X pharmaceutical and Y exercise programs." That's where we're going with this, and that is going to be amazing to help patients.
E.N.: Thank you very much for your time and knowledge, Dr. Phillips. It was our pleasure.
O.P.: This was great. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for listening.
If you want to learn more about BrainKey or would like to get your MRI scans tested, visit https://www.brainkey.ai/.
Article reviewed by
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Dr. Ana Baroni MD. Ph.D.
Scientific & Medical Advisor
Quality Garant
Ana has over 20 years of consultancy experience in longevity, regenerative and precision medicine. She has a multifaceted understanding of genomics, molecular biology, clinical biochemistry, nutrition, aging markers, hormones and physical training. This background allows her to bridge the gap between longevity basic sciences and evidence-based real interventions, putting them into the clinic, to enhance the healthy aging of people. She is co-founder of Origen.life, and Longevityzone. Board member at Breath of Health, BioOx and American Board of Clinical Nutrition. She is Director of International Medical Education of the American College of Integrative Medicine, Professor in IL3 Master of Longevity at Barcelona University and Professor of Nutrigenomics in Nutrition Grade in UNIR University.
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