FriSem

Title: A data-driven ontology of brain function: Engineered, interrogated, and clinically applied

Abstract: In modern healthcare, there is no accepted system for diagnosing mental disorders based on the alterations in brain circuitry that cause them. In neuroscience, there is no consensus on what a brain circuit is. We employ a computational approach to derive a data-driven framework for brain circuitry that synthesizes the texts and data of nearly 20,000 human neuroimaging articles. Across multiple levels of circuit specificity, the structure-function links of the data-driven framework better replicate in held-out articles than those mapped from dominant frameworks in neuroscience and psychiatry. In the first clinical application of the data-driven framework, we use the mental functions mapped to its circuits to phenotype psychiatric notes and predict outcomes including psychotropic continuation and hospital readmission. The collective results illustrate the neuroscientific and psychiatric interest in engineering a data-driven framework for brain circuitry.