Center
Decoding Mental Health

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Improve Mental Health

The Decoding Mental Health Center is an institutional initiative with over 20 years of experience developing and applying artificial intelligence (AI) to support those who care for patients with mental health challenges. Our work always begins with the person, then the machine. Our mission is to deliver clinically useful, precise information to families and caregivers.

Our center represents the continuum of knowledge that includes more than 25 leading scientists from Cincinnati Children’s, plus collaborators from a variety of scientific institutions such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Los Almos National Laboratory (LANL), Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), the University of Cincinnati (UC), University College of London (UCL), Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado, the University of Ottawa, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Dell, and UNEEQ.

From small rural clinics and local public health agencies to national healthcare systems and international governments, we are creating purpose-driven innovations that have helped the mental health of more than 3 million people around the world.

Our Research

The goal of our research is to create real-time mental health trajectories by combining natural language processing and AI techniques with a high-performance computing environment.

Research shows that all neurological and psychiatric diseases are interconnected. Our work acknowledges these differences by including this interconnectedness for use by our computational machines.

We have created unique software that learns from unstructured data (written texts or spoken words) to identify key features described in the medical record and other data. For example, we use machine learning to decode suicide notes and identify epilepsy neurosurgery candidates earlier in the disease process. More recently, we are focusing on earlier identification of mental health crisis, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and school violence. For this work, we rely on clinical, environmental and social determinants of health data.

Research By the Numbers

Our scientists have been conducting groundbreaking research for more than 20 years. Their findings have been published in dozens of top journals and their technology has been patented around the world.

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380+
Peer Reviewed Publications
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20+
US and International Patents
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$400M+
Economic Impact

Powered by Computational Excellence

The high-performance computation infrastructure provided by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) makes it easier to understand the complexities of mental health.

Our scientists partner with ORNL experts (who build upon their expertise with data related to chemistry and materials science, earth sciences, quantum information science and urban sciences) to combine medical, environmental, and electronic health record data to discover new ways for early detection of patients who are developing mental health problems.

This advanced analysis is only possible through this clinical-computational partnership.

Decoding Mental Health Publications

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