Brain Charting for Precision Psychiatry: Quantifying Individual Risk for Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders

Abstract

Quantifying the risk for current and future development of psychiatric and neurological disorders is the first step in precision medicine. This thesis aimed to investigate techniques and create models that can help us map inter-individual variation in neurobiological features and establish risk scores based on individual deviation patterns from a reference population. Normative modeling (“brain charting”) is an emerging method that can provide us with the means and (per)centiles of deviation from which we can calculate these individual deviation scores. This method has previously been applied to several types of neurological and psychiatric disorders, showing substantial neurobiological heterogeneity within these groups. Here, we extend these methods and address new clinical questions, thereby advancing the understanding of brain disorders at an individual level.