Shanghai Mental Health Center Deploys AI Tools to Improve Anxiety and Depression Screening

The Shanghai Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital in the eastern city, is deploying multiple artificial intelligence tools to improve the efficiency of mental health consultations and address shortcomings in traditional clinical assessment methods.

The center has worked with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute, a non-profit institute founded by Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao and his wife Chrissy Luo to support human brain research, to develop an AI consultation model known as Lingxi, which has shown positive early results after a year of training, Yicai learned from Chen Jianhua, the project lead and chief psychiatrist, at a recent event.

The team trained Lingxi on more than 5,000 anonymized consultation dialogues between doctors and patients with depression and anxiety disorders, and researchers are now analyzing model outputs to identify findings that may support optimized strategies for the auxiliary diagnosis and treatment of depression.

The psychiatric hospital has also deployed an EEG collection system developed by a research team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Participants only need to wear an external EEG cap, and after algorithmic processing, the system can generate a quantitative risk assessment for depression and anxiety within two minutes, Chen said.

Chen noted that some patients struggle to accurately express their feelings during clinical interviews, which may influence outcomes and introduce diagnostic bias. The EEG-based system is expected to help address this problem by providing more objective indicators to support clinicians’ judgments.

Chen reiterated that the use of AI in mental health remains exploratory and that technological development and clinical trials must strictly follow all laws and regulations while safeguarding patient safety, data security, and ethical compliance.