20th Paul Janssen Lecture: Precision Psychiatry: paradigm shift in neuroscience and clinical care or empty hope?

20th Paul Janssen Lecture: Precision Psychiatry: paradigm shift in neuroscience and clinical care or empty hope?

The success of big data and machine learning in psychiatric research has stirred up hopes for a fundamental change in clinical care toward more objective diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic decision making. Concurrently, a growing tide of criticism has raised concerns regarding the inflationary availability of poorly validated prediction methods that potentially put patients’ well-being at risk.

I will review the prospects and challenges of a short- to mid-term implementation of predictive models in clinical psychiatric care with a focus on the individualized recognition of risk for poor clinical and functional outcomes in patients with early stages of psychotic and affective disorders. The talk will specifically focus on strategies for extracting predictive patterns from heterogenous data, testing their specificity in a comparative neuroscience approach and evaluating the real-world implementability within sequential clinical workflows.

I will close my talk with a perspective on the next steps towards establishing the clinical effectiveness of precision psychiatry in clinical trials and demonstrators

Speaker: Nikolaos Koutsouleris, Professor for Neurodiagnostic Applications in Psychiatry

Professor Nikolaos Koutsouleris is the Coordinator of the EU-FP7 funded project PRONIA ("Personalised Prognostic Tools for Early Psychosis Management"; www.pronia.eu). He serves as consultant and Head of the Centre for Adolecent Psychiatry and Transitional Youth Mental Health and the Section for Neurodiagnostic Applications in Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry, Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich (LMU).

The Paul Janssen Lecture has been a regular feature of the academic calendar at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience for nearly 20 years.

Lecturers are chosen on the basis of their global eminence in the field of neuroscience with a focus on schizophrenia. The annual lecture is named in honour of Belgian pharmacologist Paul Janssen (1926–2003) noted for discovering various drugs important to psychiatry, such as haloperidol, and who founded Janssen – the pharmaceutical company which sponsors the event.

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