Depression Severity Assessment for Adolescents at High Risk of Mental Disorders

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has led to the development of automatic behavioral marker recognition, such as facial and vocal expressions. Those automatic tools have enormous potential to support mental health assessment, clinical decision making, and treatment planning. In this paper, we investigate nonverbal behavioral markers of depression severity assessed during semi-structured medical interviews of adolescent patients. The main goal of our research is two-fold: studying a unique population of adolescents at high risk of mental disorders and differentiating mild depression from moderate or severe depression. We aim to explore computationally inferred facial and vocal behavioral responses elicited by three segments of the semi-structured medical interviews: Distress Assessment Questions, Ubiquitous Questions, and Concept Questions. Our experimental methodology reflects best practise used for analyzing small sample size and unbalanced datasets of unique patients. Our results show a very interesting trend with strongly discriminative behavioral markers from both acoustic and visual modalities. These promising results are likely due to the unique classification task (mild depression vs. moderate and severe depression) and three types of probing questions.