Artificial intelligence can now predict suicide risk with remarkable accuracy

Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, hopes his work in predicting suicide risk will give people the opportunity to ask "what can I do?" Walsh and his team gathered data on 5,167 patients from Vanderbilt University Medical Center that had been admitted with signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation. "I'd like to think it'll be fairly quick, but fairly quick in health care tends to be in the order of months," he adds. Suicide is such an intensely personal act that it seems, from a human perspective, impossible to make such accurate predictions based on a crude set of data.