Development of an AI tool to automatically characterise psychotic symptoms in mental health datasets, speeding up research without placing additional demands on participants, has secured a £1.2m grant from Wellcome.
Through a new Generative AI for anxiety, depression and psychosis funding programme, the SYLFAEN project will use large language models, known as foundation models, to process data from over 8000 participants in research studies of psychotic conditions from the University's Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics .
SYLFAEN is a collaborative effort involving Cardiff academics, lived experience experts, industry partners, NHS Wales and mental health charities. SYLFAEN will be trained to identify and track psychotic symptoms in research interviews and clinical records, forming the basis for an open-source tool to be used by mental health researchers worldwide to assist with large-scale data analyses.
SYLFAEN-PSY crystallises years of groundwork between the Psychosis Research Team and Cardiff's Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise. We hope it will improve how researchers transform people's experiences of severe mental illness into rigorous, analysable data.
Dr Antonio Pardiñas, Reader at the Cardiff University Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics and SYLFAEN project coordinator, said: "We are grateful to Wellcome for their support and for creating this funding opportunity when responsible and evidence-based AI developments are more urgently needed than ever."
Professor Jose Camacho-Collados, Cardiff University School of Computer Science and Informatics and SYFLAEN model development lead, said, "I'm very excited to be part of this interdisciplinary project. Natural Language Processing and AI are fields that are developing rapidly, and we believe that they can positively contribute to improving research on mental health."
As part of our expertise within the NLP team, we are committed to developing cutting-edge AI tools that can be safely and accurately deployed to assist mental health specialists and researchers.
Dr Sarah Rees, Public Involvement Lead at Cardiff University's National Centre for Mental Health and SYFLAEN lived experience lead, added: "Placing lived experience at the heart of this project is an opportunity to ensure that the tools we create reflect real lives and real priorities."
