Center for Innovation in Artificial Intelligence for Health (CIIA-Saúde) (Subproject: Study of Association and Prediction of Severe Psychiatric Outcomes in Children and Adolescents Using Artificial Intelligence)

• Grant number: 24/14917-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2024
• End date: September 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Marco Aurelio Romano Silva
• Grantee: João Matias Ferreira dos Santos
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciências Exatas (ICEx). Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Belo Horizonte , SP, Brazil
• Company: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). Instituto de Ciências Exatas (ICEx)
• Associated research grant: 20/09866-4 - Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center for Health (CIIA-Health), AP.PCPE

Abstract

According to the WHO, 14% of young people aged 10 to 19 have mental health problems. Depression, anxiety, and behavioral disorders are among the leading causes of disability in adolescents and suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15-19 year-olds. The lack of studies on child psychiatry highlights the importance of understanding risk factors implement appropriate and early treatments.This project seeks to develop new causal machine learning models to predict self-harm and suicide in children and adolescents, using counterfactual inference for individual interventions. The approach aims to overcome the limitations of randomized clinical trials, which are expensive, ethically complex and cover few cases. In addition to demographic and environmental data, the study intends to consider treatment response and online interaction data, given that children and adolescents spend an average of 8 hours/day online.