Professor Nikolaos Koutsouleris

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 Adolescence Psychiatry and the Section for Precision Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry, Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich (LMU). He is Co-Deputy Lead of the Psychosis and Mood Disorders theme at the NIHR Maudsley BRC.

Prof Koutsouleris studied medicine at LMU between 1996 and 2003 as scholar of the German National Academic Foundation. He took his first medical and academic appointment in 2004 at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, where he finished his doctorate thesis in 2005. Since 2008, Prof Koutsouleris has advanced the use of multivariate pattern recognition methods for the identification and validation of diagnostic and prognostic prediction models in at-risk and early stages of affective and non-affective psychoses. In addition, he strived to make robust machine-learning methods available to researchers in the clinical neurosciences in order to improve the methodological rigour of this new research direction based on the proper use of validation and model sharing approaches. These efforts have the lead to the publication of the open-source NeuroMiner machine learning platform available at https://github.com/neurominer-git. 

Research Interests:

• Early recognition of psychotic and affective disorders
• Neuroimaging
• Machine learning / AI in translational research
• Biomarkers
• Stratified clinical trials

Key publications

• David Popovic, Koutsouleris N, et al. Traces of Trauma: A Multivariate Pattern Analysis of Childhood Trauma, Brain Structure, and Clinical Phenotypes. Bioogical Psychiatry, 2020

• Koutsouleris N, et al. Toward Generalizable and Transdiagnostic Tools for Psychosis Prediction: An Independent Validation and Improvement of the NAPLS-2 Risk Calculator in the Multisite PRONIA Cohort. Biological Psychiatry, 2021

• Koutsouleris N, Pantelis C, Velakoulis D, et al. Exploring Links Between Psychosis and Frontotemporal Dementia Using Multimodal Machine Learning: Dementia Praecox Revisited.   JAMA Psychiatry. 2022