Hat Day for Australian Rotary Health

Australian Rotary Health Scholar Harry Demsey is studying a PhD in Biomedicine at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health (University of Melbourne), presented at the Rotary Melbourne meeting on Wednesday 16 October 24. Harry is 1.2 years in and has roughly 2.3 years to go.

What are his research interests?
Harry loves to work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and mental health research.
What is his project about?
Let us assume you have a new drug that may treat alcohol use disorder in humans.
Before you can test it in humans, you first need to test it in an animal such as a mouse living with withdrawals from alcohol dependence.
To measure how much a drug reduces withdrawals, researchers create videos of mice, watch them and manually score the time spent scratching, shaking, wobbling, etc.
Unfortunately, this manual scoring is time consuming and tedious.
In his project, Harry wants to create an artificial intelligence that can automate the manual scoring of many behaviours from videos of mice.
He hopes this will accelerate mental health research into not only mouse models of alcohol use disorder, but mouse models of almost any human mental illness.
You can view his presentation HERE

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