Does the person experience suicidal tendencies? It is quite difficult to determine, even if the therapist is talking to the patient. According to statistics, about 80% of people who think about suicide do not tell their psychoanalyst about it during a conversation, and the specialist himself cannot always determine such decadent moods in a ward. Fortunately, an artificial intelligence algorithm can now help detect such tendencies.
After examining the MRI scans, the team used a series of keywords to identify specific areas of the brain that respond to them, and then trained the AI to correlate brain activity with the psychological state of a person.
Leading specialist and author of the algorithm Marcel Just noted that now the algorithm does not guarantee a 100% result, but it already knows how to identify alarming symptoms by analyzing the information obtained as a result of a half-hour scan on an MRI machine. So far, the giant apparatus is rather difficult to fit into a psychotherapist's office, and the technology itself is imperfect. In addition, studies were conducted on patients from two control groups, one of which included people with suicidal tendencies.
It is not yet known whether the method will work on people whose feelings are unknown to specialists, because knowing the intentions of doctors to identify certain reactions, the subject may try to suppress them in order to hide his thoughts. Nonetheless, the result is impressive: the algorithm was able to analyze the MRI scans and determine suicidal tendencies in 91 percent of known cases. Therefore, scientists hope that their development may be useful in the future, when it becomes possible to use less visible equipment and testing methods.
Viacheslav Larionov