Centenis

Centenis

Humans are quite strange in a way. We associate memories to the most commonplace objects, transcending them to new heights. Whether a miscellaneous truck stop that happened to became a mystical because of the memories shared there, the mundane taste of a grilled cheese and tomato soup that send one back years into their childhood, or a family heirloom, beaten and worn with time that we would protect with our life, each crevice of this earth has a memory, cherished by someone, associated with it. In the end it is these memories that largely give us hope, and transfigure us into the people we will ultimately be in life.

Sadly, for nearly a quarter of society many of these memories will eventually dissipate due to various medical problems such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, or even Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Although at the moment the onset of such conditions is largely inevitable, emerging treatments have shown significant strides especially given early detection and chronic treatment/monitoring of such conditions. Unfortunately, there is no nationally recognized means to test if a patient is at high risk of continuing on trajectories associated with producing such memory problems. In a sense, each hospital and at times each doctor is left to their own accord to find ways to test for such conditions in their early stages. The unique methods used span a large array of creative work-arounds, with physicians attempting to use everything from verbal, to visual to other cues to pick up on a patient’s ability to recall information.

Here is where Centenis comes in. Built as a supplemental diagnostics tool for very initial stage detection of various memory deficiency syndromes, Centenis provides physicians with qualitative data regarding a patient’s ability to recall information from images of commonplace events, items, or locations. Many published papers (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3483366/) have cited a need to test a patient’s ability to recall information from verbal and image based stimuli. Centenis, in the long run aims to provide services to test both cognitive capabilities. For the time being, Centenis, built upon IBM Watson and Google Cloud Platform is able to take in patient guesses on what randomly generated commonplace image display and output scores/statistics for physicians to use in supplement to their testing.

For us, Centenis is much more than a diagnostic tool to provide physicians with quantitative analytics. It’s a way for us to laugh, cry, and come together just a bit more with those we hold closest as we nostalgically reminisce, even if just for another day. In a way, its our selfish attempt to form more memories.