Brain imaging

[Mugwump]

When someone takes their own life, they leave behind an inheritance of unanswered questions. ?Why did they do it?? ?Why didn?t we see this coming?? ?Why didn?t I help them sooner?? If suicide were easy to diagnose from the outside, it wouldn?t be the public health curse it is today. In 2014 suicide rates surged to a 30-year high in the US, making it now the second leading cause of death among young adults. But what if you could get inside someone?s head, to see when dark thoughts might turn to action?

That?s what scientists are now attempting to do with the help of brain scans and artificial intelligence. In a study published today in Nature Human Behavior, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh analyzed how suicidal individuals think and feel differently about life and death, by looking at patterns of how their brains light up in an fMRI machine. Then they trained a machine learning algorithm to isolate those signals?a frontal lobe flare at the mention of the word ?death,? for example. The computational classifier was able to pick out the suicidal ideators with more than 90 percent accuracy. Furthermore, it was able to distinguish people who had actually attempted self-harm from those who had only thought about it.

Thing is, fMRI studies like this suffer from some well-known shortcomings. The study had a small sample size?34 subjects?so while the algorithm might excel at spotting particular blobs in this set of brains, it?s not obvious it would work as well in a broader population. Another dilemma that bedevils fMRI studies: Just because two things occur at the same time doesn?t prove one causes the other. And then there?s the whole taint of tautology to worry about; scientists decide certain parts of the brain do certain things, then when they observe a hand-picked set of triggers lighting them up, boom, confirmation.

In today?s study, the researchers started with 17 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 who had recently reported suicidal ideation to their therapists. Then they recruited 17 neurotypical control participants and put them each inside an fMRI scanner. While inside the tube, subjects saw a random series of 30 words. Ten were generally positive, 10 were generally negative, and 10 were specifically associated with death and suicide. Then researchers asked the subjects to think about each word for three seconds as it showed up on a screen in front of them. ?What does ?trouble? mean for you?? ?What about ?carefree,? what?s the key concept there?? For each word, the researchers recorded the subjects' cerebral blood flow to find out which parts of their brains seemed to be at work.

https://www.wired.com/story/fmri-ai-suicide-ideation/