A new approach to analyzing brain scans could help researchers better understand psychiatric illness using much smaller groups of patients than previously thought necessary, potentially accelerating the development of more precise mental health treatments.
Until recently, scientists believed they needed scans from thousands of people to draw reliable conclusions about how brain function relates to behavior and symptoms – a requirement that put such studies out of reach for most clinical researchers. However, in a new study in Science Advances, researchers demonstrated they could accurately predict cognitive functioning in psychiatric patients using hundreds, rather than thousands, of subjects while maintaining scientific rigor.
“This is very much in the research stage,” said Avram Holmes, associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and senior author of the study. “But eventually, these approaches could help identify underlying mechanisms that might be causing patients’ symptoms and help treat the cause as directly as possible.”
The researchers used an approach called “meta-matching,” which leverages data from large population studies to boost the accuracy of smaller clinical studies. The technique works somewhat like how tech companies use large datasets to improve predictions about individual users. To read the full story.