AI reveals the hidden face of multiple sclerosis
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“My vision sometimes blurs, as if I see a sky full of clouds. It was interesting for me to find out how my invisible symptom was reinterpreted by AI. I think this project makes it clear to everyone what it means to live with this disease and can help people with MS fight even more for their rights.” These are the words of Antonella Ferrari, godmother of AISM, writer, actress and author of the theatrical show in which she stages her condition as a person with MS. His story, his invisible symptom, together with those of 9 other people with MS, are portrayed in the PortrAIts exhibition, commissioned by AISM and inaugurated on May 30, World Multiple Sclerosis Day, in Rome in Piazza San Silvestro and in Milan in Via Dante. The images were created with the support of Artificial Intelligence, which reveals to the general public the difficulties that each of them faces in their daily life: strong, sometimes almost monstrous images that strike like a punch in the stomach, which manage to communicate exactly what that people with MS want to say: “even if it doesn’t seem like it, I have to live like this every day”.
But what are the symptoms that people with MS want to be “seen”? The arm like a piece of ice. Intertwined tongue. Head on fire. Legs heavy as boulders. The tiredness that forces you to stay in bed. Blurred vision. Needles that prick from the waist down. Spasms throughout the body. A burning that starts from the foot and goes up. The memory that sometimes fades, making the person feel like a tree at the mercy of the wind. “The exhibition ‘PortrAIts’ aims to fill this knowledge gap and raise public awareness of the invisible symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Through the testimonies of people with MS and the use of Artificial Intelligence to generate images that represent their symptoms, with the exhibition we wanted to communicate in a powerful and exciting way what people with multiple sclerosis experience on a daily basis”, explains Francesco Vacca, national president of AISM.
The exhibition was born from a need well photographed by the Doxa survey for AISM conducted in the first months of 2023 on a representative sample of the Italian population: Italians have a superficial knowledge of the disease and do not know its impact on people’s lives. In fact, although almost all of the public opinion (98%) knows MS, at least by hearsay, and over 80% know that it is a neurological disease, the level of information is uneven with respect to the symptoms. The visible symptoms are well known to the population, such as difficulty in movement (93%), lack of coordination (90%) and loss of strength (89%), while invisible symptoms, such as loss of memory (24%), depression (34%), visual disturbances (36%) and difficulty concentrating (37%). Furthermore, 60% of respondents believe that people with MS inevitably develop severe disabilities and that the disease cannot be treated with drugs.
Hence the importance of the MS Information Week to be held from 29 May to 6 June organized by AISM: meetings, demonstrations and events organized throughout Italy to raise awareness among citizens of the disease, the quality of life of people with MS and their caregivers, the protection of their rights and the importance of scientific research. World MS Day will also host a light show. The main Italian monuments, including the Pirellone in Milan, the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, Herculaneum and the institutional buildings of the Chamber, Senate and Palazzo Chigi, will be illuminated in red, to shed light on a sometimes invisible pathology.
540 thousand euros for clinical research projects and multiple sclerosis
by Tiziana Moriconi
Multiple sclerosis
Multiple sclerosis is one of the most serious diseases of the central nervous system and largely affects young people – 50% of people with MS are under 40 – twice as many women as men. In Italy there are about 140,000 people who live with this disease: every year there are 3,600 new diagnoses, 1 every 3 hours. A condition that destabilizes people’s lives and can make even small daily actions insurmountable challenges, difficulties that those who do not experience the disease cannot understand because they do not see.
Multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophies, the diagnosis is made with artificial intelligence
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Stories and technology
“AISM, through its FISM Foundation, has always promoted the use of technologies to improve the management of the disease and the quality of life of people with MS. Examples are the Italian Multiple Sclerosis and Related Pathologies Registry and the Barcoding MS project – an integrated database of clinical, genetic, imaging and patient measurement data that will provide a personalized picture of the clinical progression and biology of the disease -, as well as the development of an app that allows self-assessment and monitoring of cognitive functions of people with multiple sclerosis. And again the participation in the European Alameda project, which uses AI to bridge the gap between early diagnosis and therapeutic treatment in neurological diseases. With PortrAIts we wanted to demonstrate that AI, if used in a virtuous way, can also help in communication, to give a new voice to people with MS”, says Mario Alberto Battaglia, president of FISM.
Multiple sclerosis, technology at the service of rehabilitation
by Dario Rubino
PortrAIts was born from the story of 10 people with multiple sclerosis who generously made very intimate and personal aspects of their history of illness available to the community. Listening to them was an Artificial Intelligence program which, together with communication professionals, reworked their words generating surprising images, far from the reality visible to the eyes, but close to the actual feeling of those living with MS. “In recent months there has been a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence, its limits and the opportunities it offers. The term artificial intelligence (AI) instinctively leads us to make a comparison with human intelligence. It would be a mistake to think that AI can now replace human intelligence and capabilities, it is more of an integration or support for specific activities. The most used AI algorithms help in classification, decision making and, as in PortrAIts, in content generation. This exhibition is an example of the virtuous use of generative Artificial Intelligence”, concludes Ivano Eberini, associate professor of Biochemistry at the University of Milan.
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