SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
The article does not elaborate on how the transcripts are produced.
Automated analysis of free speech predicts psychosis onset in high-risk youths
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday August 28 2015, @09:19PM
That's largely because they are rather fuzzy. Mental illnesses occur along a continuum and there's no particularly good way of drawing the boundary lines. Additionally, the behaviors are driving by the brain and the availability of tools to look at that is still quite limited. Not to mention that there isn't much understanding of how to apply what's seen in the brain to a treatment program.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 28 2015, @09:34PM
I can say that dealing with that bipolar person in my life was incredibly stressful. It freaked me out.
But I still don't want such fuzzy definitions and slapdash science to become the basis for public policy that government and corporations (because, how can you separate the two anymore?) use to deny people their basic rights.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday August 28 2015, @11:55PM
In the real world things are fuzzy. You can't create clear categories or distinctions for things that don't have them. You're left with things like blood quantum, and they bring their own set of problems. The human brain just isn't understood adequately to make for clear distinctions that are reliably diagnosable. Most of the time the goal is to get close enough that treatment is possible. Asking more than that is probably not realistic at this time.