october 2021 w/ anush 🎃
spooky szn + gaining momentum
For the new readers: Hi! My name is Anush and I’m a 15-y-old aspiring polymath from Toronto, interested in making the world an easier place to be in. Specializing in neurotech, I’m currently working on disrupting the current mental health system using neuroimaging. Join me in my journey to making people’s lives better one step at a time ⬇.
solving painkiller misuse through pain-quantification
Physicians are modern-day drug dealers. What does that mean? Well, in 2017, over 17,000 deaths were caused by overdoses involving prescription opioids. Doctors are misprescribing pain killers because of the subjectivity of current pain assessments. Over the span of 12 hours, Mikael, Zayn, and I created a neuroimaging-based pain quantification system that would replace the primitive 1-10 system used in hospitals today, and provide doctors with an objective marker of pain. Read our memo here.
making progress with chERP
Last month, I started working on an issue that was at the intersection of my interest in cognitive neuroscience and BCI technology: mental health diagnosis. I identified a major gap between current standards of diagnosis and treatment planning and the heterogeneity between patients. Every patient is unique, and it’s difficult to give to place them into hard-cut groups based on their symptoms (along with other subjective measures).
Fortunately, our brains essentially give us feedback relating to our mental health issues in the form of correlates that we can measure using neuroimaging modalities. Unfortunately, these correlates haven’t been adopted and scaled across psychiatric practices because of a lack of knowledge, and credibility. chERP aims to fundamentally tackle the issues related to the transparency of ERP in clinical practice.
TL;DR chERP will be a search engine based on research paper summarization that will provide clinicians with a set of event-related potential neuromarkers (essentially spikes in brainwaves) most applicable to their patient’s needs.
Progress:
making a review article on the current state of mental health diagnosis and treatment planning and how QEEG+ERP can revolutionize the current standards on my Medium here → main intention is to use this article as a way to validate my understanding + an easy way to show mentors what I’m working on
Started repurposing paperai to make a proof-of-concept of my solution → paperai was used as a paper summarization and search engine model that was trained on over 500,000 COVID-19 related scholarly articles
internship update @ Divergence Neuro
Pushing for Event-related potential standardization by opening conversation with the creators of ERP CORE
Started building an ERP analysis module for the web app which will help therapists iterate on their NFB protocols
Integrated my first set of EEG visualizations onto the therapist web app
Shoutout to Pedro and Jeremy for bringing support and awesome conversations throughout the month
adding new mental models to my paradigm
First Principles:
I’ve been going about solving problems from an analogy based perspective, where I try to identify parallels to root causes in other domains → this is not the way to cause disruption
Understanding the foundational tenets of a problem is what enables invention
After learning about first principles and the value of understanding things from a “quark perspective”, I realized that I’ve been going about solving the mental health diagnosis problem wrong → decided to switch gears and focus and getting a deeper understanding of the levers relating to the problem
Using 5-why and root-cause analysis has been guiding me throughout the journey of uncovering the First Principles of mental health diagnosis
Nth Order Thinking:
Everyone can build band-aid solutions based on expected first-order (immediate/face value) outcomes, but truly impactful solutions require consideration of Nth order outcomes
Asking “then what?” allows for a deeper understanding of cause and consequence in relation to specific solutions, and is useful in evaluating the status quo
After researching the state of commercialized EEG diagnostics, I picked out NeuroCatch and VoxNeuro as major players within ERP analysis in clinics → using Nth order analysis on their solutions allowed me to find the major gaps in the status quo but also what works
You can find me on Linkedin here, Github here, and Medium here.
Thanks for Reading,
Anush