Scientists from AMRA have conducted a study, published in Obesity journal, predicting the occurrence of disease in individual patients based on real-world evidence from the UK Biobank. Individualized data can be used to create virtual control groups and deeply enrich the patient populations selected in a clinical trial.
Founded in 2010 as a spin-off of Linköping University, Sweden, AMRA is a ground-breaking international digital health company at the forefront of medical imaging and precision medicine. The company has developed a new global standard in body composition assessment, the ability to automatically produce multiple fat and muscle biomarkers with unrivaled precision and accuracy, as well as contextual disease insights – all from a single, 6-minute, whole-body MRI. AMRA aims to support transformative care and vital decision-making from clinical research to health and wellness.
AMRA utilized medical data from 10,019 participants in the UK Biobank imaging sub-study. Advanced imaging analysis techniques were applied to the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data and body composition profiles, containing visceral and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue, muscle fat infiltration, and liver fat were analyzed for each participant.
Algorithms were applied to calculate individualized Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) and Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) propensities, or natural inclination, towards these diseases. In addition, the research explored how, in the clinically relevant areas of obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), metabolic disease phenotypes can be identified to describe an individual’s inclination towards CHD and T2D.
“UK Biobank’s success has allowed us to ask a lot more of our half a million volunteer participants – including inviting them to have full body scans. We have scanned almost 40,000 people and aim for 100,000. It is clear that these pictures are providing incredibly important information to a wide range of scientists who are getting on with the business of improving health. This new work, linking fat distribution and heart health, is based on just 10,000 images. Imagine the power of ten times that number of scans, which we will have in a few years’ time, to improve diagnosis and treatment of disease. We are very grateful to our participants for giving up their time to help create this exciting resource.” – Professor Rory Collins, Principal Investigator, UK Biobank
“Individualized phenotyping and disease prediction are the Holy Grail in medicine. A person’s body weight, waist circumference and general appearance may seem ideal. However, our research shows that AMRA analytics taken from a simple MRI scan tells you so much more about what’s going on inside the body and what disease propensities may be lurking. Quite simply – ‘don’t judge a body by its cover.’” – Eric Converse, CEO, AMRA Medical
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