Effectiveness Evaluation for Clinical Depression Detection Using Deep Learning Based Synthetic House-Tree-Person Test

Depression is one of the most common mood disorders and the number of patients increases significantly in recent years. Due to the lack of biomarkers, conversation between patients and psychiatrists is still the main clinical diagnostic method which is easily influenced by subjectivity of both patients and psychiatrists. Synthetic House-tree-person test (S-HTP), a convenient and efficient mental assessment tool, minimizes subjective influences from patients, while its effectiveness is limited by the professional ability of analyst. Here we introduce a deep learning model DeHTP, a flexible and convenient depression detection method based on S-HTP without interaction between people. Experimental results demonstrate that DeHTP achieves 0.963 AUC and 0.9 accuracy, and outperforms the conventional manual analysis of S-HTP, which is conducted on the guideline of 50 conclusions from previous study related to depression. In addition, it reveals 22 depression-correlated drawing features aligned with conclusions above from the perspective of our proposed model. Leveraging the advantages of deep learning and S-HTP, this approach has the potential for widespread promotion and adoption as the available tool for daily self-mental monitoring, as well as the promising auxiliary diagnostic method in clinical.