Biomarker discovery for psychiatry

The systematic search for neural readouts that index psychiatric states or predict treatment response, motivated by the failure of symptom-based diagnostic categories to map cleanly onto brain circuits. Frameworks such as the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) reframe psychopathology along dimensional constructs — reward, threat, cognitive control, arousal — that may correspond better to measurable circuit dysfunction than categorical diagnoses like those in the DSM.

For neuromodulation the goal is an actionable biomarker: state-specific, causally linked to symptoms, and stable enough to drive a device in daily life. Progress is real but incremental. Most candidate biomarkers reported in the literature do not survive out-of-sample or cross-site validation, and the field increasingly demands that a proposed biomarker be tested prospectively and, ideally, shown to change symptoms when perturbed.