One such powerful supercomputer, dubbed Summit and currently the nation’s fastest, is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy national laboratory in Tennessee managed by UT-Battelle, LLC. In part to advance this work, Pestian holds dual appointments at Cincinnati Children’s and ORNL.
“We are excited to leverage ORNL’s world-class leadership computing capabilities to impact the future of pediatric mental health,” says ORNL principal investigator Greeshma Agasthya. “Improving mental health outcomes is a major challenge, and we are dedicated to using our expertise to capitalize on the wealth of information available in health records, medical notes, and medical images, while ensuring the privacy of the data.”
Anuj Kapadia, ORNL’s Section Head for Advanced Computing for Health Sciences, adds: “This collaboration, which is actively guided by clinician and pediatric mental health experts at Cincinnati Children’s, will be a step towards better mental health outcomes for our children.”
Why Mental Health?
Overall, 17.4% of U.S. children aged 2–8 years have a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. That adds up to five children in every classroom of 30 students.
Childhood anxiety and depression are becoming more frequent over time. Too often, the tragic outcome of untreated and undertreated conditions is suicide—now the second leading cause of death in young people ages 10 to 24 years old. These issues can devastate families, and the impacts can span generations.
“The medical community has understood for many years that mental illnesses have been severely overlooked in terms of research priority and availability of effective treatment options. And yet, so many of the families we serve are living with the burden of seeking hard-to-obtain help for their children in need,” says Tina Cheng, MD, MPH, Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and Director of the Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation.
Now, as part of its five-year strategic plan, the medical center is investing $10 million to pursue a project that could make a significance difference.