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IBM's AI Can Predict Schizophrenia With 74 Percent Accuracy By Looking at the Brain's Blood Flow (engadget.com)

Andrew Tarantola reports via Engadget: Schizophrenia is not a particularly common mental health disorder in America, affecting just 1.2 percent of the population or around 3.2 million people, but its effects can be debilitating. However, pioneering research conducted by IBM and the University of Alberta could soon help doctors diagnose the onset of the disease and the severity of its symptoms using a simple MRI scan and a neural network built to look at blood flow within the brain. The research team first trained its neural network on a 95-member dataset of anonymized fMRI images from the Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network which included scans of both patients with schizophrenia and a healthy control group. These images illustrated the flow of blood through various parts of the brain as the patients completed a simple audio-based exercise. From this data, the neural network cobbled together a predictive model of the likelihood that a patient suffered from schizophrenia based on the blood flow. It was able to accurately discern between the control group and those with schizophrenia 74 percent of the time. What's more, the model managed to also predict the severity of symptoms once they set in. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

7 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Not common? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How is 1.2% "not particularly common"?

    1. Re:Not common? by BlackPignouf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      GP has a point though. 1.2% of 7.5 billion is still 90 million.

  2. the hard part by lisabeeren · · Score: 3, Insightful

    discriminating between people who have sz, and those who don't isn't very difficult.

    how does it go discriminating between people with sz, and say, bipolar? these can be genuinely difficult for clinicians to tell apart, and would be useful.

  3. Re:Not common?: The U.S.isn't the world by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    You extended U.S. stats to the world. You assume the rest of the world has as many mental disorders as the U.S. While most of those belonging to your major political party still stand behind Trump.

  4. Re:Not common?: The U.S.isn't the world by quenda · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Incidence is actually lower in Western countries, including the US. Though rates are much higher in black immigrants to the West.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  5. Re:Better than random by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    According to wikipedia, schizophrenia occurs in 0.3-0.7% of the population. So 0.15% of the general population that have schizophrenia won't be diagnosed as having it, but about 25% of the general population who are not schizos will be diagnosed as having it.

    A false positive rate 100x the actual rate is pretty much useless....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  6. Meaningless Summary Statistics by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Saying something is 74% accurate without stating false positive and false negative rates falls apart for rare diseases.

    Here's an example: I have actually have a better method that can distingish between a control group and the real cases with 98.8% accuracy. I'm not kidding. All I do is I always say the person does not have the disease. Since 98.8% of people do not have it, I'm automatically correct 98.8% of the time.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.