BINYAMINA, Israel,, April 22, 2021 / PRNewswire / – Montfort (Mon4T), an innovative medical startup specializing in neurological disorders, announces a new platform to help diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia.
The development is based on the “Brain Profiler,” a new science-based method that views mental disorders as brain disorders that can be accurately diagnosed in a clinical way.
Developed by senior psychiatrist Dr. Abraham Peled, who have partnered with Israeli startup Montfort and their EncephaLog ™ application, the approach aims to bridge between classical psychiatry and computer neuroscience.
Based on the extensive literature on computer neuroscience, the method could also allow for effective intervention in the future, in order to correct disorders, which could result in a cure.
“Psychiatry as a medical field faces a major diagnostic challenge: today’s psychiatric diagnosis is based on a descriptive approach, relying solely on the patient’s description of their symptoms and the patient’s clinical observation,” he explains. Dr. Abraham Peled, a specialist in psychiatry, chairman of the Department at Shaar Menashe Psychiatric Hospital and lecturer at Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology. “However, other medical fields use an etiological diagnosis that clearly defines the pathology or symptoms of a particular place in the body. For example, appendicitis is an infection (pathology) of an organ in the body, an appendix. And a psychiatric diagnosis like” depression “does not correlate with a particular organ in the body, nor does it define any pathology. ”
Montfort uses smartphone and AI technology to provide digital neurological tests that have been cleared by the FDA for patients with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and more. So far, the company has focused on motor and cognitive test protocols, which are routinely used by neurologists around the world. As a result of cooperation with dr. In the past year, Montfort has added affective indicators to his test protocol that assess a patient’s anxiety, depression and more.
Dr. Abraham Peled: “Having tested several possibilities of applying the method in recent years, I chose Montfort because of the demonstrated ability of their application to bridge classical psychiatry and computational neuroscience. an explanation in terms of problems with the connection of neurological networks. As a next step, the diagnosed network disorder will be shown by EEG (electroencephalogram) procedure which was previously very complex to implement, therefore only available in hospitals, but is now available to every patient at home.
Dr. Ziv Yekutieli, Montfort Executive Director: “Given the complexity of the human brain in general, and psychiatric disorders in particular, psychiatrists find it difficult to monitor progress in other medical fields. The practitioner must make clinical decisions based on subjective and nonquantitative data collected on random, brief clinical visits the patient’s status during his daily life. These difficulties limit the psychiatrist’s ability to optimally treat the patient and limit the ability of pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. “
According to WHO, over 300 million people worldwide suffer from psychiatric disorders. Without optimal treatment, these individuals suffer severe consequences that affect their health, families and society as a whole.
Dr. Peled leads an international group of psychiatrists who support the method, applying it to the upcoming launch of a new version on the Montfort platform. With greater use, databases will be augmented and analyzed in the cloud using Montfort tools. According to Peled and Yekutieli, building a large database is crucial for validating a computer diagnosis of a brain based on neuroscience, which can only be achieved by digital psychiatry.
The new application on the Montfort platform will enable the independent collection of patient indicators such as his movement, patterns of social interaction and many others. Some of these indicators are already being collected by researchers and companies. For the first time, a comprehensive collection of all necessary indicators will be available, in parallel with data collection by a psychiatrist at the clinic and the use of an AI model to predict any brain connectivity disorders, which could explain the disorder.
“Ignorance of the causes of psychiatric disorders has serious consequences for treatment,” he says Dr. Peled. “We can’t fix a system if we don’t know exactly what’s wrong with it. It is absolutely important to discover the causes of mental disorders if we ever hope to cure them. “Peled spent many years treating difficult patients, including schizophrenia. Frustration that he could not truly cure them forced him to change his approach and connect with the digital world and algorithms, including the Montfort app.
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Niv Keidar
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https://mon4t.com/