Center

Decoding Mental Health

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Improve Mental Health

At the Decoding Mental Health Center, we use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to help those who care for patients with mental health challenges. Our focus is the person, and then the machine. Our mission is to provide clinically useful precision 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 the University of Cincinnati, the University of Colorado and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

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 anxiety, depression, suicide 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.