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IFIA Magazine March 2025

Young Innovator Spotlight:

Santosh Patapati

By Aarin Bothra, Innovation World
At just 15 years old, Santosh Patapati, a 10th-grade student at
Panther Creek High School in Texas, USA, has made remarkable
strides in addressing a global challenge. Santosh developed
DepScope, a groundbreaking machine learning solution for
diagnosing depression using remote clinical interviews. This
innovative approach combines multimodal neural networks
and large language models to provide an objective, cost-
effective, and highly accurate tool for clinicians.
The inspiration behind DepScope stems from the escalating
global mental health crisis. With over 300 million people
affected by depression and alarming increases in suicide
rates, the need for better diagnostic tools is critical. Santosh
identified a key issue: traditional diagnostic methods are
often subjective, costly, and prone to misdiagnosis, with error
rates as high as %54.
DepScope’s innovative architecture leverages advanced
machine learning to analyze clinical interviews, offering
clinicians an unbiased tool to aid in diagnosis. Unlike many AI-
driven systems, DepScope prioritizes transparency. It not only
delivers a diagnosis with confidence levels but also explains
its reasoning, ensuring that clinicians retain ultimate control
over the decision-making process. The platform is designed
as a web application, ensuring accessibility for healthcare
professionals worldwide.
“Students need to recognize the importance of mental health
and how widespread it is in our world.” This belief drives
Santosh’s passion for innovation and his commitment to
raising awareness about the mental health crisis.
Santosh’s journey to develop this advanced technology was
not without challenges. The high costs associated with using
closed-source models, such as GPT4-, during development
were a significant hurdle. Demonstrating incredible dedication,
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