A team of researchers at the University College London have leveraged artificial intelligence and related language models to design a tool that can help with diagnosing schizophrenia by analyzing speech patterns in patients. The new artificial intelligence tool is described in a recent article published in PNAS.
However, when it comes to diagnosing schizophrenia, clinicians often employee close psychiatric evaluation that involves speaking with patients as well as friends and family who are close to them. In some cases, blood draws or brain imaging scans can be helpful to confirm a diagnosis. However, this diagnostic approach limits clinician’s ability to deeply understand people with schizophrenia.
To provide more nuance to clinician’s attempts to understand schizophrenia patients, artificial intelligence models allow researchers to look at patient more closely. Specifically, researchers worked with 52 volunteers: half with schizophrenia, half without schizophrenia. Participants were asked to complete two types of verbal tasks, one where they were asked to list as many things that come to mind when asked to list “animals” and “words that start with the letter p.” Then, researchers put the participant’s responses through an AI language model trained on an extensive data set, and tried to see if the AI could predict similar answers as the participants and whether that predictability went down for people with schizophrenia.
Overall, findings suggest that AI could predict more of the answers given by the control group than the schizophrenia group, particularly in those with severe symptoms.
So what’s this all have to do with schizophrenia? Researchers suggest that it how we respond to these kinds of tasks performed in the study has to do with the way the brain forms relationships between concepts and ideas, particularly memories, and how the brain organizes this information into constructs called “cognitive maps.” People with schizophrenia forms these types of “cognitive maps” differently, affecting how they respond to these types of questions.
Given the emergence of other language-based artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, researchers believe this type of technology could be of great benefit in clinical settings.
Sources: Science Daily; PNAS