For the past year, PD Dr. Anke Salmen and her team from the Department of Neurology at St. Josef-Hospital, Bochum University Hospital have been using the innovative technology from machineMD in their research to better understand neurological diseases and develop new biomarkers. The research focus of Dr. Anke Salmen and her team is on inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system - the most common and best known of which is multiple sclerosis. She is particularly interested in visual disturbances and new methods to assess these diseases. More than 400 patients and control subjects have already been examined. We spoke with Dr. Anke Salmen about the first results of her research, the use of machineMDs technology in everyday clinical research practice and her plans for the future. 

How many examinations have been carried out so far? 

Anke Salmen: In the last twelve months, the team has carried out more than 400 examinations using the technology developed by machineMD. The participants were between 18 and 88 years old. Approximately 220 of the examinations were carried out on people with demyelinating CNS diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS), neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorders (NMOSD) and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody disorders (MOGAD). We also examined around 30 patients with myasthenia gravis and 20 people with Huntington's disease. The rest served as a healthy control group.

How was the examination received by the patients?  

Very well! The feedback was consistently positive. It was important for us that the examination did not involve much additional work and could therefore be carried out very easily as part of an outpatient appointment. Word has obviously spread among specialists. We are increasingly receiving interest from specialist colleagues who want to objectively study visual manifestations of existing neurological diseases. 

What initial findings have you been able to gain from the examinations? 

In initial case series, we were able to objectively determine oculomotor dysfunction in myasthenia gravis and multiple sclerosis. In myasthenia, it seems to be possible to determine the exhaustion of the eye muscles, which could be used as an objective parameter to assess the success of treatment. In MS, we have seen significantly more frequent saccadic disturbances and other abnormalities such as pendular nystagmus or internuclear ophthalmoplegia (INO) compared to healthy individuals. 

Have these findings already been published? 

Some results have been summarized and published in specialist journals such as *NeuroAktuell*. There have also been presentations at congresses such as EUNOS and ECTRIMS 2024. The response at the congresses was consistently positive. There is a great deal of interest in the technology used and the device itself, and we are currently working on a series of case studies. 

What is your personal conclusion? 

I am enthusiastic about the technology and how smoothly it works. We will continue to rely on machineMD's excellent and timely support to drive our projects forward. 

What plans do you have for the future?  

We plan to further expand the patient cohorts and quantitatively analyze the entire data set. A further step will be to use the data for machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns and make predictions about the course of the diseases.