Speech Analysis Program May Improve Psychosis Prediction in At-Risk Youth

A speech analysis software program is able to predict which youth at risk for schizophrenia will transition to psychosis with about 80 percent accuracy, according to areport inWorld Psychiatry.“In psychosis, the very structure of language can be disturbed, including semantic coherence (for example, derailment and tangentiality) and syntactic complexity (for example, concreteness),” wrote Cheryl Corcoran, M.D., of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and colleagues. “Our findi ngs support the utility and validity of automated natural language processing methods to characterize disturbances in semantics and syntax across stages of psychotic disorder.”Apilot study by Corcoran and colleagues published in 2015 demonstrated that using speech analysis software on transcripts of interviews with 34 New York youth at risk for psychosis could be a reliable tool to identify the youth most likely to convert to psychosis within a couple of years. The software was designed to identify semantic problems, such as short sentences, incoherence between phrases, and reduced usage of pronouns.To see whether their software was effective at predicting psychosis transition in a larger sample, the researchers analyzed transcripts obtained from a cohort of 59 at-risk youth from a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) clinical site. Of this group, 19 developed a psychotic disorder within two years, and 40 did not.In this UCLA cohort, transcripts were generated from an exercise in w...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: first episode psychosis language deficiency machine learning speech analysis transition to psychosis Source Type: research