VUMC study to use artificial intelligence to explore suicide risk

With the help of a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center will use computational methods to shed light on suicidal ideation and its relationship to attempted suicide, predict suicidal ideation and suicide attempt using routine electronic health records (EHRs) and explore the genetic underpinnings of both. From 1999 to 2017, the all-ages suicide rate in the United States increased 33%, from 10.5 to 14.0 per 100,000 population. In 2017 there were 47,173 recorded suicides, making it the nation's 10th leading cause of death. The principal investigators for the study are internist and clinical informatician Colin Walsh, MD, MA, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics, Medicine, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and geneticist and computational biologist Douglas Ruderfer, PhD, MS, assistant professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Biomedical Informatics. In previous work Walsh and colleagues used EHR data and machine learning techniques to develop predictive algorithms for attempted suicide.