Artificial Intelligence Detects Suicidal Tendencies in People Using Brain Scans

Recent scientific progress has allowed us to begin decoding the significance of many different patterns of activity in the brain. Researchers have begun to understand patterns associated with disorders such as depression, in hopes of correcting it. Other research has zeroed in on how language and speech is signaled in the brain. In one often-cited experiment, researchers were even able to convert the MRI readouts of the test subjects' brains into approximate renditions of the movie clips shown to participants. Now new research seeks to use artificial intelligence to identify people suffering from suicidal thoughts based on brain scans alone. In a paper published this week in Nature Human Behavior, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University looked at 34 participants, half of whom were experiencing suicidal thoughts.