This is fascinating and such important research, the ability to distinguish between actual self-harm vs. thought of self-harm. There are clearly huge philosophical issues around this type of fMRI application — i.e. Minority Report. Hopefully, we as a society can create a sound moral compass to leverage such tools to save lives.
H/T: https://machinelearnings.co/ for finding the below:
“Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh analyzed how suicidal individuals think and feel differently about life and death, by looking at patterns of how their brains light up in an fMRI machine. Then they trained a machine learning algorithm to isolate those signals… The computational classifier was able to pick out the suicidal ideators with more than 90 percent accuracy. Furthermore, it was able to distinguish people who had actually attempted self-harm from those who had only thought about it.” – Megan Molteni, Science Writer Learn More on WIRED >