machine learning decode depression
Can Machine Learning Decode Depression?
Suicide and depression are strongly linked, with suicide being the second leading cause of death for young people ages 15 to 34. Suicide rates in the United States have remained largely unchanged for the last 50 years. One of the most difficult jobs for psychiatrists is to assess suicide risk in our patients. A particular challenge is incorporating all of the clinical data that we obtain, such as patient's history of depression, their use of drugs, and their past suicide attempts, into producing a suicide risk assessment. What if we had a tool that would help us to do that in a more quantitative way, helping us to more accurately identify high risk patients, and give them preventative care?