Quantifying the Association Between Psychotherapy Content and Clinical Outcomes Using Deep Learning

Key Points Question What aspects of psychotherapy content are significantly associated with clinical outcomes? Findings In this quality improvement study, a deep learning model was trained to automatically categorize therapist utterances from approximately 90 000 hours of internet-enabled cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). Increased quantities of CBT change methods were positively associated with reliable improvement in patient symptoms, and the quantity of nontherapy-related content showed a negative association. Meaning The findings support the key principles underlying CBT as a treatment and demonstrate that applying deep learning to large clinical data sets can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

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