Depression is a major cause of global mental illness and significantly influences suicide rates. Timely and accurate diagnosis is essential for effective intervention. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a non-invasive and accessible method for examining cerebral activity and identifying disease-associated patterns. We propose a novel graph-based deep learning framework, named Edge-gated, axis-mixed Pooling Attention Network (ExPANet), for differentiating major depressive disorder (MDD) patients from healthy controls (HC). EEG recordings undergo preprocessing to eliminate artifacts and are segmented into short periods of activity. We extract 14 features from each segment, which include time, frequency, fractal, and complexity domains. Electrodes are represented as nodes, whereas edges are determined by the phase-locking value (PLV) to represent functional connectivity. The generated brain graphs are examined utilizing an adapted graph attention network. This architecture acquires both localized electrode characteristics and comprehensive functional connectivity patterns. The proposed framework attains superior performance relative to current EEG-based approaches across two different datasets. A fundamental advantage of our methodology is its explainability. We evaluated the significance of features, channels, and edges, in addition to intrinsic attention weights. These studies highlight features, cerebral areas, and connectivity associations that are especially relevant to MDD, many of which correspond with clinical data. Our findings demonstrate a reliable and transparent method for EEG-based screening of MDD, using deep learning with clinically relevant results.

Language disruptions are one of the well-known effects of schizophrenia symptoms. They are often manifested as disorganized speech and impaired discourse coherence. These abnormalities in spontaneous language production reflect underlying cognitive disturbances and have the potential to serve as objective markers for symptom severity and diagnosis of schizophrenia. This study focuses on how these language disruptions can be characterized in terms of two computational linguistic measures: surprisal and semantic coherence. By computing surprisal and semantic coherence of language using computational models, this study investigates how they differ between subjects with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Furthermore, this study provides further insight into how language disruptions in terms of these linguistic measures change with varying degrees of schizophrenia symptom severity.

Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image - guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Austria . Abstract (2 50 words) Background We aimed to quantify hepatic vessel volumes across chronic liver disease stages and healthy controls using deep learning - based magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) analysis, and assess correlations with biomarkers for liver (dys)function and fibrosis/portal hypertension. Methods We assessed retrospectively healthy controls, non - advanced and advanced chronic liver disease (ACLD) patients using a 3D U - Net model for hepatic vessel segmentation on portal venous phase gadoxetic acid - enhanced 3 - T MRI. Total (TVVR), hepatic (HVVR), and intrahepatic portal vein - to - volume ratios (PVVR) were compared between groups and c orrelat ed with: a lbumin - b ilirubin [ ALBI ] and "m odel for e nd - s tage l iver d isease - s odium " [ MELD - Na ] s core) and fibrosis/portal hypertension (Fibrosis - 4 [ FIB - 4 ] Score, liver stiffness measurement [ LSM ], hepatic venous pressure gradient [ HVPG ], platelet count [ PLT ], and spleen volume. Results We included 197 subjects, aged 54.9 13.8 years (mean standard deviation), 111 males ( 56 .3 TVVR and HVVR were highest in controls (3.9; 2.1), intermediate in non - ACLD (2.8; 1.7), and lowest in ACLD patients (2.3; 1.0) ( p 0. 001) . PVVR was reduced in both non - ACLD and ACLD patients (both 1.2) compared to controls (1.7) ( p 0. 001), but showed no difference between CLD groups ( p = 0.999) . TVVR and PVVR showed similar but weaker correlations. Conclusion s Deep learning - based hepatic vessel volumetry demonstrate d differences between healthy liver and chronic liver disease stages and shows correlations with established markers of disease severity. Relevance s tatement Hepatic vessel volumetry demonstrates differences between healthy liver and chronic liver disease stages, potentially serving as a non - invasive imaging biomarker.

Despite the diversity of brain data acquired and advanced AI-based algorithms to analyze them, brain features are rarely used in clinics for diagnosis and prognosis. Here we argue that the field continues to rely on cohort comparisons to seek biomarkers, despite the well-established degeneracy of brain features. Using a thought experiment, we show that more data and more powerful algorithms will not be sufficient to identify biomarkers of brain diseases. We argue that instead of comparing patient versus healthy controls using single data type, we should use multimodal (e.g. brain activity, neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, brain imaging) and longitudinal brain data to guide the grouping before defining multidimensional biomarkers for brain diseases.

Alzheimer's disease detection requires expensive neuroimaging or invasive procedures, limiting accessibility. This study explores whether deep learning can enable non-invasive Alzheimer's disease detection through handwriting analysis. Using a dataset of 34 distinct handwriting tasks collected from healthy controls and Alzheimer's disease patients, we evaluate and compare three recurrent neural architectures (LSTM, GRU, RNN) against traditional machine learning models. A crucial distinction of our approach is that the recurrent models process pre-extracted features from discrete strokes, not raw temporal signals. This violates the assumption of a continuous temporal flow that recurrent networks are designed to capture. Results reveal that they exhibit poor specificity and high variance. Traditional ensemble methods significantly outperform all deep architectures, achieving higher accuracy with balanced metrics. This demonstrates that recurrent architectures, designed for continuous temporal sequences, fail when applied to feature vectors extracted from ambiguously segmented strokes. Despite their complexity, deep learning models cannot overcome the fundamental disconnect between their architectural assumptions and the discrete, feature-based nature of stroke-level handwriting data. Although performance is limited, the study highlights several critical issues in data representation and model compatibility, pointing to valuable directions for future research.

Depression is a widespread mental disorder that affects millions worldwide. While automated depression assessment shows promise, most studies rely on limited or non-clinically validated data, and often prioritize complex model design over real-world effectiveness. In this paper, we aim to unveil the landscape of clinical depression assessment. We introduce C-MIND, a clinical neuropsychiatric multimodal diagnosis dataset collected over two years from real hospital visits. Each participant completes three structured psychiatric tasks and receives a final diagnosis from expert clinicians, with informative audio, video, transcript, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals recorded. Using C-MIND, we first analyze behavioral signatures relevant to diagnosis. We train a range of classical models to quantify how different tasks and modalities contribute to diagnostic performance, and dissect the effectiveness of their combinations. We then explore whether LLMs can perform psychiatric reasoning like clinicians and identify their clear limitations in realistic clinical settings. In response, we propose to guide the reasoning process with clinical expertise and consistently improves LLM diagnostic performance by up to 10% in Macro-F1 score. We aim to build an infrastructure for clinical depression assessment from both data and algorithmic perspectives, enabling C-MIND to facilitate grounded and reliable research for mental healthcare.

AI-based voice analysis shows promise for disease diagnostics, but existing classifiers often fail to accurately identify specific pathologies because of gender-related acoustic variations and the scarcity of data for rare diseases. We propose a novel two-stage framework that first identifies gender-specific pathological patterns using ResNet-50 on Mel spectrograms, then performs gender-conditioned disease classification. We address class imbalance through multi-scale resampling and time warping augmentation. Evaluated on a merged dataset from four public repositories, our two-stage architecture with time warping achieves state-of-the-art performance (97.63\% accuracy, 95.25\% MCC), with a 5\% MCC improvement over single-stage baseline. This work advances voice pathology classification while reducing gender bias through hierarchical modeling of vocal characteristics.

Parkinson's disease (PD) poses challenges in diagnosis and monitoring due to its progressive nature and complex symptoms. This study introduces a novel approach utilizing surface electromyography (sEMG) to objectively assess PD severity, focusing on the biceps brachii muscle. Initial analysis of sEMG data from five PD patients and five healthy controls revealed significant neuromuscular differences. A traditional Support Vector Machine (SVM) model achieved up to 83% accuracy, while enhancements with a Graph Convolutional Network-Support Vector Machine (GCN-SVM) model increased accuracy to 92%. Despite the preliminary nature of these results, the study outlines a detailed experimental methodology for future research with larger cohorts to validate these findings and integrate the approach into clinical practice. The proposed approach holds promise for advancing PD severity assessment and improving patient care in Parkinson's disease management.

We studied a generalized question: chronic diseases like ME/CFS and long COVID exhibit high heterogeneity with multifactorial etiology and progression, complicating diagnosis and treatment. To address this, we developed BioMapAI, an explainable Deep Learning framework using the richest longitudinal multi-omics dataset for ME/CFS to date. This dataset includes gut metagenomics, plasma metabolome, immune profiling, blood labs, and clinical symptoms. By connecting multi-omics to a symptom matrix, BioMapAI identified both disease- and symptom-specific biomarkers, reconstructed symptoms, and achieved state-of-the-art precision in disease classification. We also created the first connectivity map of these omics in both healthy and disease states and revealed how microbiome-immune-metabolome crosstalk shifted from healthy to ME/CFS.

Automation of sleep analysis, including both macrostructural (sleep stages) and microstructural (e.g., sleep spindles) elements, promises to enable large-scale sleep studies and to reduce variance due to inter-rater incongruencies. While individual steps, such as sleep staging and spindle detection, have been studied separately, the feasibility of automating multi-step sleep analysis remains unclear. Here, we evaluate whether a fully automated analysis using state-of-the-art machine learning models for sleep staging (RobustSleepNet) and subsequent spindle detection (SUMOv2) can replicate findings from an expert-based study of bipolar disorder. The automated analysis qualitatively reproduced key findings from the expert-based study, including significant differences in fast spindle densities between bipolar patients and healthy controls, accomplishing in minutes what previously took months to complete manually. While the results of the automated analysis differed quantitatively from the expert-based study, possibly due to biases between expert raters or between raters and the models, the models individually performed at or above inter-rater agreement for both sleep staging and spindle detection. Our results demonstrate that fully automated approaches have the potential to facilitate large-scale sleep research. We are providing public access to the tools used in our automated analysis by sharing our code and introducing SomnoBot, a privacy-preserving sleep analysis platform.