The funding will support the creation of personalized, AI-driven ‘vital signs’ from speech and language analysis to measure psychosis severity.

Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research received $4 million from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to improve how severe mental health conditions are assessed and treated. By using an AI-powered advanced speech and language analysis, the research aims to develop personalized metrics to gauge the severity of psychosis. This research has the potential to transform the way patients with mental illness are diagnosed and treated, leading to more precise and effective care.

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Dr. Sunny Tang led the study. (Credit: Feinstein Institutes)

Led by Sunny Tang, MD, assistant professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the Feinstein Institutes, this research will explore methods to extract objective information from patient speech samples using computational algorithmic approaches, including artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Her team will leverage a large existing dataset of approximately 3,500 speech samples from individuals on the psychosis spectrum and collect prospective data from 100 new participants to develop and evaluate these AI models, aiming to provide rapid and accurate, individual symptom prediction over time. By identifying a change in a patient’s language use and speech patterns, clinicians may be able to identify potential mental health episodes and intervene sooner.

“Psychiatry has long sought objective markers to guide diagnosis and treatment, much like other fields of medicine use vital signs or blood work to monitor physical health,” said Dr. Tang. “This grant empowers us to innovate at the intersection of artificial intelligence and mental health, developing a precision tool that can provide real-time, personalized insights into psychosis severity to change how we care for these patients sooner.”

Dr. Tang and her team’s research addresses a critical unmet need in mental health care: The scarcity of objective, low-cost markers for illness severity in psychosis which currently hinders effective measurement-based care. This project harnesses advanced automated speech and language analysis to generate objective data to gauge concurrent psychosis severity. This rapid, scalable and non-invasive method can be deployed using ordinary smartphones, making it highly accessible even in low-resource settings.

A key aspect of the research is to evaluate whether trajectories in these predicted severity scores can accurately capture concrete instances of clinical stressors, such as emergency room visits or hospitalizations. This will be assessed through both advanced AI algorithms and a “human intelligence” approach, where clinicians interpret plotted trajectories of symptom severity scores. The study also emphasizes community engagement, ensuring individuals with lived experience of psychosis and community mental health clinicians contribute to the study’s design and the development of future randomized controlled trials, fostering a person-centered approach to implementation in real-world clinical settings.

“The diagnosis of psychosis can be challenging, but accurate and early diagnosis can enhance the responses to therapy,” said Kevin J. Tracey, MD, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes and Karches Family Distinguished Chair in Medical Research. “Dr. Tang’s research using AI-enabled speech analysis offers a significant new pathway to early and specific diagnosis.”

About the Feinstein Institutes

The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research is the home of the research institutes of Northwell Health, the largest health care provider and private employer in New York State. Encompassing 50+ research labs, 3,000 clinical research studies and 5,000 researchers and staff, the Feinstein Institutes raises the standard of medical innovation through its six institutes of behavioral science, bioelectronic medicine, cancer, health system science, molecular medicine, and translational research. We are the global scientific leader in bioelectronic medicine – an innovative field of science that has the potential to revolutionize medicine. The Feinstein Institutes publishes two open-access, international peer-reviewed journals Molecular Medicine and Bioelectronic Medicine. Through the Elmezzi Graduate School of Molecular Medicine, we offer an accelerated PhD program. For more information about how we produce knowledge to cure disease, visit http://feinstein.northwell.edu and follow us on LinkedIn.

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