PsychAssist

What is PsychAssist?

A virtual diagnostician for neurodevelopmental disorders.
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Integrating psychological and medical fields, brain dysfunctions affect millions of people today through neuropsychiatric problems or impaired motor function. Using a database with records of symptoms from DSM-5, PsychAssist acts as a virtual diagnostician that specializes in neurodevelopmental disorders.

The PsychAssist program database is based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM–5) diagnostic book, a product from 10 years of collaboration between international psychologists. This project utilizes text input from a patient describing certain symptoms for psychological disorders.

Using sentiment analysis, PsychAssist will be able to detect certain moods from the description and reduce the input to concise key words. This ambiguity of the input is in the way the patient describes what he/she is feeling. Using the formatted database connected to the algorithm, the code will be able to use sentiment analysis to generate similarity computations and output a diagnosed disorder.

How it Works

Initially, the program parses user input for keywords, then compares those keywords to the DSM description for each category of mental disorder. A similarity score for each disorder is calculated based on the average of the similarity score for each keyword.
If the program determines that you are likely to have a mental disorder, it asks the user to answer a series of yes or no questions based upon the disorders listed in that specific category as denoted by the DSM.

Significance

This project serves as a demonstration of the potential that the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning with diagnosing brings. Sometimes, physicians may miss mental disorders, and there is a lot of nuance in the manifestations of mental disorders. Having computing power behind confirming a diagnosis would be helpful to physicians.
PsychAssist has great potential to create real impact because psychologists don’t have the time to sit and sift through over 900 pages of DSM. This tool will transformative in confirming diagnoses because a machine can easily parse through the text and provide an accessible helping hand to patients.

Database

The PsychAssist program database is based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM–5) diagnostic book, a product from 10 years of collaboration between international psychologists. This project utilizes text input from a patient describing certain symptoms for psychological disorders. This program is able to connect key words from DSM and key words from the user input to detect which disease they are most likely experiencing. If the text input is completely unrelated to neurodevelopmental disorders, the program will be able to differentiate legitimacy. Additionally, PsychAssist will ask the least possible number of questions. For example, you must satisfy at least 2 out of 4 criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder. If you answer with 3 “no”s consecutively, the program will not as the remaining criteria and will move on to the next disorder.