Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Penn’s Linguistic Data Consortium have received a two-year, $4 million grant from the Wellcome Trust to develop a scalable, AI-powered platform for training mental health clinicians.
STELLAR — short for Steering-Vector Enhanced LLM Agents for Realistic Digital Twins in Mental Health — will create virtual patients known as “digital twins” in the form of AI-driven simulations that allow trainees to practice clinical interviews with patient profiles whose psychiatric symptoms can be precisely adjusted.
One challenge in educating mental health clinicians is to prepare trainees for the complexity of real clinical conversations, where symptoms can overlap, shift over time and be expressed differently from person to person. STELLAR’s goal is to provide an ethical, repeatable way for trainees to simulate interviewing patients across a wide range of symptom presentations, backgrounds and clinical scenarios.
“STELLAR brings together behavioral data, clinical expertise and AI to ask a very practical question,” says Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Research Associate Professor in Computer and Information Science (CIS) within Penn Engineering and one of the project leads. “Can we build training tools that better prepare clinicians for how varied and complex patients are?”
