Cognitive Diagnostics for Clinical Depression and Response to Treatment

Inventor (s): Mohammad M. Herzallah

Date Awarded: July 2020

Summary:

Clinical depression is the leading cause for dysfunction and the second leading cause for death in young people worldwide.  The accuracy and length of current and classical screening and diagnostic systems suffer severe limitations by relying on subjective rather than objective measures.  Our technology uses simple 5-minute computer games and applied mathematics to construct a cognitive profile for the individual.  Based on extensive research on the cognitive profile for clinical depression, using machine learning algorithms, the participant is assigned an estimate of how likely they have clinical depression.  If the individual tests positive, the system can also predict whether the participant would benefit from antidepressant therapy.  Based on collected data from patients, the accuracy of our system exceeds 95%.  By screening for clinical depression and prediction of response to treatment in ~5 minutes, our system provides immediate relevance to the patients and their families (individually or through employers), clinical providers, and insurance companies.  The uniqueness of our system lies in utilizing cognitive profiles to screen for clinical depression.  We use active testing rather than passive tracking, which can be easily adopted in a clinic setting.  With more validation, our system can become the gold standard for diagnosis in psychiatry.

Market Applications 

• FOR PATIENTS:  Pre-appointment screening test.
  • Offers higher accuracy than traditional methods.
  • Reduces waiting times.
  • Ameliorates stigma.
• FOR PROVIDERS:  A computerized physician’s assistant.
  • Provides accurate likelihood of having clinical depression.
  • Predicts response to treatment a priori; saving weeks of trial and error.
  • Saves the provider’s time to focus on the treatment plan.
  • Allows for accepting more patients.
• FOR INSURANCE:  Individualized and objective assessment
  • Cost savings by providing higher accuracy results.