The human brain contains a lot of data.
“You often hear people say you only use 5 to 10% of the brain, but it’s not true,” says Joel Stoddard, MD, MAS, associate professor of psychiatry and secondary faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Studying patterns across people’s very active brains has become pivotal to Stoddard’s work as a psychiatrist in Children’s Hospital Colorado’s Emotion and Development Lab. Recently, his team has been working to use artificial intelligence (AI) to study which patterns may point to a risk of suicidality. The tool can then help create models that predict future suicidal thoughts and behaviors and point to potential interventions that might work best for an individual patient.
In addition to his own research, Stoddard sees a future where psychiatry benefits significantly from the rise of AI tools in research and in clinical use. Here he answers some questions about current and future capabilities.