Saturday, November 22, 2025

AI's double-edged impact on neurological care: A tool for Innovation or a source of bias?

Researchers call for safeguards to prevent deepening health disparities in brain disease diagnoses

University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences

As artificial intelligence’s role in healthcare rapidly expands, a comprehensive new report co-authored by UCLA Health states that the same technology that can help doctors detect strokes or seizures could also worsen health disparities unless proper safeguards are in place.

The report, published in the journal Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, examined AI’s growing role in neurological care. While the technology has already shown benefits such as allowing doctors to make faster decisions in classifying brain tumors or analyzing stroke imaging, researchers say AI’s reliance on large datasets poses a risk for patients in vulnerable populations who are already underrepresented in research and underdiagnosed.

At the same time, AI presents potential to allow for healthcare providers in resourcelimited settings to recognize early signs of neurological diseases based on clinical notes, for clinics to improve enrollment of underrepresented groups in research studies, or for health systems to ensure all patient groups are receiving high quality care and improved health outcomes.

“That means that AI could help doctors in areas with a shortage of neurologists to recognize neurological diseases months earlier, ensure medications match what patients can afford, automatically write medication instructions in the patient’s primary language and flag when certain populations are being systematically excluded from clinical trials,” said the study’s senior author Dr. Adys Mendizabal, a neurologist and health services investigator at UCLA Health. “The technology exists. We just need to build it with equity as the foundation.”

Consulting with experts in healthcare, AI experts, Food and Drug Administration officials and one AI company, Mendizabal and researchers from nine other universities identified both the benefits and pitfalls of AI implementation in neurological care and created three guiding principles for future implementation:

Diverse perspectives must shape AI development: healthcare institutions must involve community advisory boards reflecting the demographics of populations they serve to ensure AI tools are culturally sensitive and linguistically appropriate.

AI education for neurologists: researchers must understand AI is not an infallible source of information and should be trained to recognize potential biases in algorithmic outputs.

Strong governance: Independent oversight with clear accountability must be established to monitor AI performance, investigate failures and give patients the ability to report concerns or delete their health care data.

Investigators said the governance of AI must evolve continuously alongside the technology itself, requiring constant collaboration between government regulators, healthcare institutions, AI developers and patients.

“We are at a critical moment,” Mendizabal said. “The decisions we make now on how to develop and deploy AI in healthcare will determine whether this technology becomes a force for equity or another barrier to care.”

Journal

Neurology

DOI

10.1212/WNL.0000000000214356

Method of Research

Literature review

Article Title

Health Equity Considerations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2025

Cute little marsupials pack a punch at mealtimes

Australian bettongs' dramatic nut-cracking ability

Flinders University

image:
Australia's threatened bettongs possess different adaptations to enjoy one particularly tough favourite food of theirs – Santalum seeds, which include the sandalwood, and Australia’s native peach (or quandong).
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Credit: Flinders University

Native Australian animals range from high-hopping kangaroos to fast-running emus – but clever little bettongs also have a special ability to find and eat the food they love.

Flinders University researchers have discovered the secrets behind a superpower of these tiny relatives of kangaroos which allows them to crack open seeds that would break the jaws of most animals. They hope the research will help conservation efforts, including finding suitable locations to reintroduce populations severely impacted by predation and habitat loss.

The new study, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, reveals how two species of these threatened bettongs possess different adaptations to enjoy one particularly tough favourite food of theirs – Santalum seeds, which include the sandalwood, and Australia’s native peach (or quandong).

First author Maddison Randall, Flinders University PhD candidate, says the rabbit-sized marsupials are essential to their environments, spending most of their time digging in search of soft foods such as underground fungi, roots and tubers.

While most bettongs typically feed on softer foods, the burrowing bettong (Bettongia lesueur or ‘boodie’) and the brush-tailed bettong (Bettongia penicillata or ‘woylie’), are also known to crack open the tough outer shells of sandalwood and quandong seeds to obtain the nutritious kernels from inside.

“These seeds are extraordinarily tough, needing bite forces much higher than typical rabbit-sized animals can produce to crack them open,” says Ms Randall, from the College of Science and Engineering.

“We expected the skulls of these tiny animals to have jaw adaptations that can handle higher bite forces but were surprised to find that the two seed-cracking species have developed different biting adaptations to solve the same tough-shelled challenge.”

The team scanned 161 bettong skulls from museums across Australia, including all four living species in the genus, with the eastern bettong (Bettongia gaimardi) and the northern bettong (Bettongia tropica). Using these digital reconstructions of the skull scans, they were able to compare skull shape across the genus using 3D shape analysis.

Flinders University Professor Vera Weisbecker, who co-authored the study, says the jaw adaptations of the two closely related species were not as similar as expected.

“The boodie has a shorter face than the other species. This gives it more leverage, allowing harder biting. But the woylie doesn’t have a shorter face. It instead has a reinforced part of the skull where biting the seeds takes place,” she says.

Another co-author Dr Rex Mitchell adds the difference in snout length may be because the woylie, unlike the boodie, also relies much more on underground fungi (truffles). Thus, their longer snout might help them sniff these out by providing more surface area inside their noses for their sense of smell.

“Understanding animal dietary needs and their associated adaptations is invaluable information for conservation of threatened species,” says Dr Mitchell.

“All four species of bettong around today are threatened to some degree and have been reduced to a fraction of their range since European settlement.

“Therefore, information about their dietary needs, limits and capabilities is vital for conservation and could be used to inform suitable habitat for reintroduction initiatives.”

Bettongs’ other superpower is their major role as ecosystem engineers, with their digging and foraging behaviour turning over soils and leaf litter which improves soils health, water filtration, seed germination and, ultimately, helps ecosystems thrive.

Despite their struggling numbers, these tiny but mighty marsupials are a powerful reminder that there's more than one way to crack a tough nut.

The article, ‘Cracking the case: Differential adaptations to hard biting dominate cranial shape in rat-kangaroos (Potoroidae: Bettongia) with divergent diets (2025) by Maddison C Randall, Vera Weisbecker, Meg Martin, Kenny J Travouillon (WA Museum), Jake Newman-Martin (Curtin University, WA) and D Rex Mitchell has been published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, DOI: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaf158. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaf158

Acknowledgements: This research received funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CE170100015), and a Future Fellowship (FT180100634) to Professor Weisbecker. This research was conducted on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people.

Thanks to all the Australian museums for access to scan their specimens and for assistance from the ANFF under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and Flinders Microscopy and Microanalysis.

Flinders University PhD candidate Maddison Randall and colleagues scanned the skulls of more than 160 bettong skeletons stored in Australian museums.

Flinders researcher Dr Rex Mitchell says all four species of bettong in Australia, the tiny relatives of kangaroo, have different diets and been reduced to a fraction of their range since European settlement of Australia.

Credit

Flinders University