Friday, August 28, 2015

Not sure if this is just a little bit scary...

How a Computer Predicts Schizophrenia and Psychosis - The Atlantic

Most of the time, people don’t actively track the way one thought
flows into the next. But in psychiatry, much attention is paid to such
intricacies of thinking. For instance, disorganized thought, evidenced
by disjointed patterns in speech, is considered a hallmark
characteristic of schizophrenia. Several studies of at-risk youths have
found that doctors are able to guess with impressive accuracy—the best
predictive models hover around 79 percent—whether a person will develop
psychosis based on tracking that person’s speech patterns in interviews.

A computer, it seems, can do better.

 That’s according to a study published Wednesday
by researchers at Columbia University, the New York State Psychiatric
Institute, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in the Nature
Publishing Group journal Schizophrenia. They used an automated
speech-analysis program to correctly differentiate—with 100-percent
accuracy—between at-risk young people who developed psychosis over a
two-and-a-half year period and those who did not. The computer model
also outperformed other advanced screening technologies, like biomarkers
from neuroimaging and EEG recordings of brain activity.

Actually, having recently re-watched the first part of it, this also puts me in mind of the interview technique with the replicants in Blade Runner.

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