Biological Subtyping in Psychiatry: Hope, Controversy, and A New Method by Logan GROSENICK

Talk from Logan GROSENICK (Weill Cornell Medicine)
SHORT ABSTRACT:
Recent years have seen a flurry of new developments using machine learning for biological subtyping in psychiatry, promising potentially transformational improvements in individualized care by enabling data-driven personalized diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.
Biological subtypes of major depressive disorder and, more recently, autism spectrum disorder, have shown that distinct neurobiology may be at the root of heterogeneity in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. However, such biological subtyping methods and cross-sectional neuroimaging approaches have also raised controversy, mainly centered around their feasibility and reproducibility. In this talk, I will provide supporting evidence for robust and reproducible biological subtypes in psychiatry, offer insight as to why some groups may have failed to find them, and present a new approach that improves significantly on existing methods for identifying patient subgroups in multiomics and neuroimaging data.