THE way the mind works has inspired a computational technique that can probe the regions of the brain affected by schizophrenia. The program could eventually lead to earlier diagnosis of the disorder.
Exactly what goes wrong in the brains of people with schizophrenia is yet to be pinned down. Raymond Deicken at the University of California at San Francisco and colleagues have been studying the amino acid N-acetylaspartate (NAA). They found that levels of NAA in the thalamus region of the brain are lower in people with schizophrenia than in those without.
To find out whether software could diagnose…
