AI-driven early diagnosis of specific mental disorders: a comprehensive study

Cogn Neurodyn. 2025 Dec;19(1):70. doi: 10.1007/s11571-025-10253-x. Epub 2025 May 5.

ABSTRACT

One of the areas where artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are used is the detection and diagnosis of mental disorders. AI approaches, including machine learning and deep learning models, can identify early signs of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, depression, suicidality, and dementia by analyzing speech patterns, behaviors, and physiological data. These approaches increase diagnostic accuracy and enable timely intervention, which is crucial for effective treatment. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of AI approaches applied to mental disorder detection using various data sources, such as survey, Electroencephalography (EEG) signal, text and image. Applications include predicting anxiety and depression levels in online games, detecting schizophrenia from EEG signals, detecting autism spectrum disorder, analyzing text-based indicators of suicidality and depression, and diagnosing dementia from magnetic resonance imaging images. eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), light gradient-boosting machine (LightGBM), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor were designed as machine learning models, and convolutional neural networks (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models suitable for the dataset were designed as deep learning models. Data preprocessing techniques such as wavelet transforms, normalization, clustering were used to optimize model performances, and hyperparameter optimization and feature extraction were performed. While the LightGBM technique had the highest performance with 96% accuracy for anxiety and depression prediction, the optimized SVM stood out with 97% accuracy. Autism spectrum disorder classification reached 98% accuracy with XGBoost, RF and LightGBM. The LSTM model achieved a high accuracy of 83% in schizophrenia diagnosis. The GRU model showed the best performance with 93% accuracy in text-based suicide and depression detection. In the detection of dementia, LSTM and GRU models have demonstrated their effectiveness in data analysis by reaching 99% accuracy. The findings of the study highlight the effectiveness of LSTM and GRU for sequential data analysis and their applicability in medical imaging or natural language processing. XGBoost and LightGBM are noted to be highly accurate ML tools for clinical diagnoses. In addition, hyperparameter optimization and advanced data pre-processing approaches are confirmed to significantly improve model performance. The results obtained with this study have revealed the potential to improve clinical decision support systems for mental disorders with AI, facilitating early diagnosis and personalized treatment strategies.

PMID:40330715 | PMC:PMC12052716 | DOI:10.1007/s11571-025-10253-x