Psychiatry’s foremost challenge is that its symptom-based classification
has insufficient predictive value for clinical outcomes. Precision
psychiatry attempts to improve treatment response by searching for
predictive biomarkers, which should be described in the context of the
neurobiology of illness to help facilitate the development of new
treatments.
This primer for clinicians aims to outline the problems that precision
psychiatry faces, how computational methods can overcome them and how
these methods can be used in clinical practice. Clinicians have an
important role in translating this research and incorporating
computationally-derived transdiagnostic biomarkers in clinical trials
opening the possibility for personalised therapies.