COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHIATRY: A BRIDGE BETWEEN TRANSLATION AND PRECISION
Authors: Możaryn *Jakub Filip , Szczegielniak Anna Rebeka 
Published: February 2025

Background

Current classifications of neuropsychiatric disorders are primarily based on qualitative groupings of well-defined symptoms, whereas a change in the diagnostic framework is needed. The goal of precision psychiatry is to provide a personalized and tailored approach to prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for better individual outcomes. It is based on multiple data domains such as unique symptom expression, genetics, cognition, neuroimaging, and psychosocial factors to identify different clinical phenotypes and individual biotypes among patients. It also requires a translational approach to the underlying neurobiological mechanisms and the identification of reliable biomarkers. Computational psychiatry seems to be an essential tool to connect these two fields.

Aims & Objectives

The study aims to highlight the place of computational psychiatry in modern mental health care and the challenges associated with its implementation. Research objectives are as follows: 1) summarize types of computational approaches to multi-level complex data used in computational psychiatry; 2) discuss utilization areas of computational modelling in psychiatry; 3) present general limitations and challenges in implementation.

Method

Focusing on the basic theoretical assumptions of computational psychiatry and its applications in mental health care, a narrative review of the literature published in English in the PubMed and EMBASE databases until January 10, 2024 was conducted.

Results

The leading areas of medicine currently exploiting the opportunities offered by new technologies to achieve contextualized precision diagnosis and treatment are radiology, oncology, neurology, and cardiology. While computational modelling of behavior has been used in neuroscience, direct translation of the results into the context of both diagnosis and psychiatric treatment appears to be much more difficult due to the interaction of genetic, physiological, comorbidity and environmental factors on mental status. Several key methods from computational psychiatry can improve precision psychiatry. First, biophysically realistic neural network (BRNN) models allow the simulation of brain functions to understand cognitive patterns in mental disorders. Second, algorithmic reinforcement learning (ARL) models are proposed for psychiatric analysis. Finally, probabilistic approaches, such as Bayesian models (BM), can be used to predict mental states and behaviors, taking into account individual variability. These techniques facilitate a personalized approach to psychiatry, enabling tailored insights and treatments for individual patients. In addition to the methods known in other leading areas of medicine, there is an increasing interest in natural language processing (NLP) to search for the traits of the changes in mental status. In this area especially, combination of the probabilistic methods and large language models (LLM’ s) based on transformer architecture are the prospective solutions for the psychiatric treatment.

Discussion & Conclusions

Precision psychiatry can enhance its approach by integrating big data and machine learning techniques from computational psychiatry. However, addressing the challenges requires a multi-faceted approach, including more ecologically valid models, better integration of computational methods into clinical practice, and further research into the reliability and validity of these techniques.

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