2024-10-09 14:26:00
Guillaume Dumas is an associate professor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal, a researcher at the Azrieli research center of the Sainte-Justine University Hospital (Montreal) and at Mila, the Quebec artificial intelligence (AI) institute directed by Yoshua Bengio. He directs the laboratory “Precision psychiatry and social physiology”in which artificial intelligence plays an important role.
How does your research constitute an innovation in the field of psychiatry?
Since my thesis work, I have been interested in intercerebral synchronizations. It is now known that the brain reacts differently when engaged in social interaction; However, this discovery has had consequences for how we understand mental health. Instead of reducing mental disorders to what happens inside the skull, we now know that we must take into account the entire body and the social environment in which the patient evolves.
Take the case of autism: autism has long been reduced to a problem affecting a region of the brain or a mutated gene. We now believe that to understand autism we must have a multiscale approach, ranging from biological data to the social environment. Our laboratory works around this complementarity between “precision psychiatry” (or “personalized psychiatry”) which is based on current technological tools, such as artificial intelligence and its big data, which allow to refine the diagnosis and the rate of treatment, and on the other hand “social physiology”, which takes into account cultural variations and the social determinants of mental health.
How does artificial intelligence help you in this precision medicine?
Most people think of artificial intelligence as something radically new; For my part, I see continuity with what already existed in medicine, when we worked with statistics. But classical statistics was intended to test hypotheses, when artificial intelligence allows us to produce “forecasts” from the data, that is, indicate possible solutions that we do not know.
The advent of “computational” medicine, or the use of mathematics and information technology of which artificial intelligence is a part, makes it possible to identify patterns, what we call pattern recognition : we can recognize patterns, genetic ones for example, and therefore identify a tumor, sequence it to treat it better. Oncology was a precursor in the use of AI, but this obviously remains a challenge in psychiatry, where thought, consciousness, “ineffability” are touched upon, without yet knowing scientifically how exactly the brain and cognition work . Furthermore, to try to better understand the mechanisms at work in psychotherapy, we are currently recording clinical interviews between psychiatrists and patients in order to collect data on brain activity, physiological activity and the language used.
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