
Artificial intelligence detects ADHD without questionnaires and doctors
Imagine you could diagnose ADHD simply by how your brain processes flickering letters on a screen. No questionnaires, no months of waiting for an appointment with a specialist. AI looks at your visual rhythms and gives a verdict with 92% accuracy. Sounds like science fiction? But this is already reality.
A research group from the University of Montreal decided to dig deeper into the nature of the disorder that affects about 2.5% of adults worldwide. Professor Martin Arguin says directly: With high ADHD prevalence, we know surprisingly little about its neural foundations.
The experiment is simple: 49 people looked at flickering French words overlaid on visual noise. And here’s what turned out: people with ADHD demonstrate a completely special rhythm of visual information processing at frequencies of 5, 10 and 15 hertz. The machine learning algorithm identified them with 92% accuracy.
But then it gets even cooler. The system could distinguish those taking stimulating medications from those not taking them with 91% accuracy. For the medication group, accuracy was all 100%! Medications leave a measurable trace in brain rhythms.
And now the most curious part. According to scientists, you can easily identify people with ADHD based on patterns, which points to possibly a single cause of the disorder.