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posted by martyb on Friday March 31 2017, @04:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the Is-that-you,-Marvin? dept.

Supercomputers could do what meatbags can't do: label meatbags as depressed by analyzing thousands of voxels:

Depression affects more than 15 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, each year. It is the leading cause of disability for those between the ages of 15 and 44. Is it possible to detect who might be vulnerable to the illness before its onset using brain imaging? David Schnyer, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, believes it may be. But identifying its tell-tale signs is no simpler[sic] matter. He is using the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to train a machine learning algorithm that can identify commonalities among hundreds of patients using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans, genomics data and other relevant factors, to provide accurate predictions of risk for those with depression and anxiety.

[...] In the recent study, Schnyer analyzed brain data from 52 treatment-seeking participants with depression, and 45 heathy control participants. To compare the two, a subset of depressed participants was matched with healthy individuals based on age and gender, bringing the sample size to 50.

Evaluating the diagnostic utility of applying a machine learning algorithm to diffusion tensor MRI measures in individuals with major depressive disorder (open, DOI: 10.1101/061119) (DX) (alt)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @03:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @03:55PM (#487124)

    How does this computer compare to Dr. Sbaitso [wikipedia.org]?

    Sometimes when I need to vent I'll talk to Dr. Sbaitso. He helps me step away from myself and see things from different angles.

    (Of course, it's all an illusion since Dr. Sbaitso is just an Eliza program with a speech synthesizer. But that's kind of what I'm interested in. Is this any better than Dr. Sbaitso?)