Imagin
e a day when a mental health expert could take a look at data about a classroom of first graders and identify who is at risk for suicidal behavior as a high schooler.
Imagine a health care system that enables the people who care about those children to take action early enough to prevent such a tragedy from occurring.
That’s the ultimate goal of the bold new mental health “trajectories” project, announced Nov. 8, 2021, by leaders at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, one of the world’s leading pediatric research, care and training centers. It’s a massive task that will involve more than 25 leading scientists at nine different research divisions within Cincinnati Children’s as well as collaborators at the University of Cincinnati, the University of Colorado and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The team plans to assemble large amounts of data from many sources that investigators already know play at least some role in influencing the mental health of a growing child.
“Before we can cure and prevent, we have to understand the real origins of mental illness, especially the roles of biological, thought, and environment factors. Together these components are very, very complex and can only be understood with the help of the world’s most powerful computers.” says John Pestian, PhD, MBA, an expert in building neuropsychiatric artificial intelligence algorithms and co-principal investigator for the project.
One such powerful supercomputer, dubbed Summit,is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy national laboratory in Tennessee managed by UT-Battelle, LLC. In part to advance this work, Pestian holds dual appointments at Cincinnati Children’s and ORNL.
For more information: https://www.ornl.gov/news/10m-investment-cincinnati-childrens-launches-ambitious-mental-health-mission