The Team at Aifred Health: Providing Personalized Treatment in Mental Health

Cutting-edge psychiatry made possible by artificial intelligence will provide better treatment of depression.

Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash

Depression is a common mental health condition that comes at a high cost to patients and society. While many effective treatments for depression exist, a structured method to determine which patient will benefit most from a given treatment remains unknown. Clinicians thus employ a “guess and check” approach that often requires multiple attempts to identify effective treatments for patients.

We aim to improve current clinical practice by providing software tools that assist clinicians with prescribing treatments more effectively. Our solution is to apply artificial intelligence technology as an innovative means to personalize treatments for individual patients.

Using the artificial intelligence (AI) technique called deep learning, we are training computer algorithms with medical data to produce treatment decision aids that support physicians in providing the best care in mental health. As a founding team of neuroscientists, psychiatrists and computer scientists, our startup company, Aifred Health, is born from our efforts to translate academic research into products that improve and save lives.

Our innovation has the potential to significantly reduce healthcare costs and the time required for patients to find relief. This project has produced a general technology that we can later scale and adapt for the treatment of other illnesses (even beyond mental health) and for predicting the risk of suicide. We are confident that our innovation will produce a technology that we can apply across mental health, improving patient outcomes wherever a personalized approach will provide the best care.

Founding team members

David Benrimoh, CEO

David is a physician completing his residency in psychiatry. He is pursuing residency and neuroimaging research at McGill University, as well a Masters in Neuroscience with a focus on computation at University College London. He also has significant experience in advocacy and policy work. As CEO at aifred health, he is a bridge that connects our Research and Machine Learning Teams.

Robert Fratila, CTO

Robert is a Co-Founder and CTO at aifred health. He is passionate about combining medicine and AI throughout his work and research. His notable experience in finding efficient solutions to complex problems stems from his work as a software developer at the Montreal Neurological Institute, integrating state-of-the-art machine learning models in health care, specifically brain imaging, has given him lots of experience.
In his spare time, he completed several projects including a search engine, a brain-state classifier, full computer vision packages for autonomous underwater vehicles and a computer model to predict future patients diagnosed with Leukemia, just to name a few.
He dedicates much of his time to conducting workshops and talks about his work to student groups at McGill University including the Neuroscience Undergraduates of McGill (NUM) and McGill Women in Computer Science (McWiCS). His commitment to spreading knowledge and demystifying the wonderful field of machine learning is one of his greatest attributes.

Eleonore Fournier-Tombs, CFO

Eleonore has over a decade of experience in international organizations, management and startups. While working at the United Nations (UN) she led the Secretariat’s website development team and the Human Development Report Office’s data and website presence. In 2012, the UN awarded herthe Secretary General’s Award for innovation in sustainability. She was also the New York data science lead for a fintech startup, specializing in insider threat detection for major financial firms in the US and Europe. Having completed degrees from McGill, SOAS and the University of Toronto, Eleonore is completing her PhD in Information Systems at the University of Geneva.

Marc Miresco, CMO

Marc is a psychiatrist at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, and the Director of External Services for the Mental Health Department of the CIUSSS West-Central Montreal. He has 15 years of clinical experience with a focus on mood and anxiety disorders. He is the editor of PsychVisit.com, a website offering comprehensive information on mental health disorders, and developed Aminy, a professional-grade symptom-tracking mobile app for mental health.

Sonia Israel, Director of Scientific Partnerships

As the Director of Scientific Partnerships for Aifred, Sonia will soon complete her Honours Neuroscience degree at McGill University. Sonia co-founded aifred with the intention of enhancing the interface between leading research and mental health care. Her experience as a research student at the Montreal Neurological Institute provides Sonia with expertise in interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving needed to lead innovations in healthcare. She is the recipient of numerous leadership awards, including the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal of Quebec. Sonia’s thirst for innovation drives her to create and identify opportunities for collaboration in the psychiatric sector.

Kelly Perlman, Director of Research

Now a neuroscience student at McGill University, Kelly is a co-founder of Aifred Health. She has the primary goal of ensuring that every step in the development of the product is firmly grounded in science, in order to optimize the prediction of treatment response. She conducted several neuroimaging research projects, including the analysis of steering of gait in stroke patients using PET imaging, as well as the the computation of grey and white matter morphology in senior, world-class athletes using of anatomical and diffusion-weighted MRI. She is now a student researcher in a neuroimmunology laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Additionally, she is the VP external of McGill’s neurotechnology club (MENTAL), and is passionate about all things science.

Additional team leads in product, design & marketing

(Last updated: February 2018)

• Emily Snook
• Lisa Palladini
• Eunice You
• Emmanuel Bengio
• Nykan Mirchi
• Raina Fan
• Steven Zhang
• Eleanor Brown
• Myriam Tanguay-Sela
• Sabrina Knappe
• Jingla-Fri Tunteng
• Colleen Rollins
• Jerome Williams
• Sneha Desai
• Raymond You
• Matthew Krause
• Robert Brown

Members of our growing advisory board

Dr Gustavo Turecki

Douglas Mental Health University Institute / McGill University
As a leading specialist in suicide research and Chair of Psychiatry at McGill, Dr Turecki helps guide the design of clinical trials and the design of our software innovation for use in psychiatric clinical settings.

Dr Mathieu Blanchette

McGill University
As a computational biologist and computer scientist, Dr Blanchette oversees the software development and data analysis required for training our deep-learning algorithm.

Dr Marcelo Berlim

Douglas Mental Health University Institute / McGill University
As a leading expert in depression research, Dr Berlim leads students conducting literature reviews in the treatment of depression and assists in assessing the predictive accuracy of treatments for depression determined by our algorithm.