Scientists build a better Facebookificial brain

A team of scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (CUNY) have completed a major milestone in the journey to build a better artificial brain for patients with schizophrenia. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the group describes the molecular and computational improvements made to the Stanford neural network chip in order to to run thousands of tasks as an artificial neural network.

Schizophrenia is the most common mental disorder affecting children and adolescents and is the most common diagnosis and the reason for the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions diagnosis of 9 out of 100000 children in the United States diagnosed with the psychotic disorder. Current treatment strategies exist primarily for symptoms. However current technologies are not able to detect many cases of actual schizophrenia as are false positives errors and negatives.

Clinical psychiatrists have long been able to detect changes in brain circuits that are known to be caused by a problem in the communication between brain cells called synapses and are the primary cause for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.