NIMHANS, IIT Kharagpur, LGBRIMH launch AI depression screening project in Indian languages

Bengaluru: NIMHANS here on Thursday launched a two-year research project with IIT Kharagpur and LGBRIMH, Tezpur, to develop an AI-assisted system to screen for depression in Indian languages.

The Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of Assisted Depression Screening (HEADS) project, funded by the Wellcome Charitable Foundation, will develop and test an open-source system capable of listening to clinical interviews, transcribing and translating them, and providing clinicians with a summary, depression assessment and severity estimate, along with the reasoning and a confidence score.

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AI to screen depression in 5 languages

Clinicians will review and correct the AI-generated assessments and retain final decision-making authority, the NIMHANS said in a release. Over the 24-month project, psychiatrists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences and Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health will interview 4,500 consenting participants, including 4,000 patients and 500 healthy volunteers, in Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese and English.

IIT Kharagpur will lead the development and testing of the AI models, including assessments for bias and safety. The project seeks to address limitations in existing AI tools in capturing how people describe psychological distress in their own languages and idioms. The institutions said pilot work had found that off-the-shelf speech recognition systems, language models and privacy tools performed below the requirements for clinical use in Indian languages.

NIMHANS, IITK, LGBRIMH signagreement

As part of the launch, two Memoranda of Understanding were signed, one between NIMHANS and LGBRIMH and another between NIMHANS and IIT Kharagpur. Under the agreements, NIMHANS will undertake clinical data collection in Kannada, Hindi and English, while LGBRIMH will collect data in Assamese, Bengali and English.

IIT Kharagpur will handle AI engineering. The event was presided over by NIMHANS Director and Professor of Psychiatry Y C Janardhan Reddy. "It is a difficult puzzle to crack even for clinicians, especially for anxiety and depression, so any help that a machine can provide should be scientifically studied," Reddy said.

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NIMHANS Principal Investigator Lekhansh Shukla said depression was common and treatable but was often missed, particularly when people were unable to describe their distress in their own language. "HEADS is about building tools that help clinicians recognise it earlier, while keeping the clinician firmly in charge of the decision," he said.

The project is expected to produce an open, modular screening tool, de-identified datasets of clinical interviews in Indian languages, and trained researchers and engineers across the three institutions. It aims to support earlier recognition of depression, including by non-specialist health workers, and enable screening in a person's own language, NIMHANS said.