Background: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), as a potential powerful classifier, was explored to assist psychiatric diagnosis of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI).
Method: Both Back-Propagation (BP) and Kohonen networks were developed to fit psychiatric diagnosis and programmed (using 60 cases) to classify neurosis, schizophrenia and normal people. The programmed networks were cross-tested using another 222 cases. All subjects were randomly selected from two mental hospitals in Beijing.
Results: Compared to ICD-10 diagnosis by psychiatrists, the overall kappa of BP network was 0.94 and that of Kohonen was 0.88 (both P < 0.01). In classifying patients who were difficult to diagnose, the kappa of BP was 0.69 (P < 0.01). ANN-assisted CIDI was compared with expert system assisted CIDI (kappa = 0.72-0.76); ANN was more powerful than a traditional expert system.
Conclusion: ANN might be used to improve psychiatric diagnosis.