Israeli app aims to retool mental health diagnosis into an exact science

Binyamina-based start-up Montfort has launched a new smartphone technology that it says can help bridge the gap between classic psychiatry and computational neuroscience, transforming mental health into an exact science.

The development is based on ‘Brain Profiler’, a new science-based method that looks at mental disorders as brain disturbances, which can be accurately diagnosed in a clinical manner. The new platform can help diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and could also allow effective intervention in the future to fix disturbances, possibly resulting in a cure, the company said.

“Psychiatry as a medical field is facing a major diagnostic challenge: Today’s psychiatric diagnosis is based on a descriptive approach, relying solely on the patient’s description of their symptoms and the clinicians’ observation of that patient,” explained Abraham Peled, an expert in psychiatry,department chair at Sha’ar Menashe Psychiatric Hospital and a lecturer at Technion–Israel Institute of technology. “Other medical fields, however, utilize an etiological diagnosis which clearly defines the pathology or symptoms of a specific place in the body. For example, Appendicitis is the infection (the pathology) of an organ in the body, the appendix. A psychiatric diagnosis such as depression does not correlate to a specific organ in the body, nor does it define any pathology.”

Montfort uses smartphone technology and AI in order to provide FDA-cleared digital neurological tests for patients with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and more. So far, the company has focused on motor and cognitive test protocols, routinely used by neurologists around the world. As a result of the cooperation with Dr. Peled in the past year, Montfort added to its test protocol effective indicators assessing the patient’s anxiety, depression and more.

“Montfort translates the digital indicators it collects to terms that psychiatrists are familiar with like depression, anxiety, psychosis and suggests an explanation in terms of neurological networks connectivity problems,” Peled explained. “As a next step, the diagnosed network disturbance will be demonstrated by EEG (electroencephalogram), a procedure that was previously very complicated to conduct, therefore available only in hospitals, but is now available to any patient at home.”

The new app on Montfort’s platform will allow a self-collection of the patient’s indicators such as his movement, social interaction patterns, and many more. Part of these indicators is already collected by researchers and companies. For the first time, a comprehensive collection of all required indicators will be available, in parallel to collecting data by the psychiatrist at the clinic, and using the AI model to predict any brain connectivity disturbances, which could explain the disorder, the company said.

“Not knowing the causes of psychiatric disorders has serious consequences for treatment”, said Peled. “We cannot fix a system if we do not know exactly what is wrong with it. It is absolutely critical that we discover the causes of mental disorders if we ever hope to cure them.”