New AI tool increases accuracy of schizophrenia diagnosis

A novel artificial intelligence (AI) enabled tool can help diagnose schizophrenia more accurately than other such systems, according to a study led by an Indian origin scientist. The tool called EMPaSchiz, developed by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada, examined brain scans from patients who were diagnosed with schizophrenia and predicted the diagnosis with 87 per cent accuracy. The finding, published in the journal NPJ Schizophrenia, follows on a previous study in 2017 in which researchers at IBM and Alberta developed a tool capable of predicting schizophrenia with 74 per cent accuracy. "Schizophrenia is characterised by a constellation of symptoms that might co-occur in patients. Two individuals with the same diagnosis might still present different symptoms. This often leads to misdiagnosis," said Sunil Kalmady, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alberta.