Thesis defense Thomas Wolfers (Donders series 368)

15 March 2019

Promotors: prof. dr. B. Franke, prof. dr. J. Buitelaar
Co-promotor: dr. A. Marquand

Towards Precision Medicine in Psychiatry

Group-level differences disguise a large biological heterogeneity and extreme inter-individual differences between patients with the same mental disorder. This strongly suggests that the ‘average patient’ is a non-informative construct in biological psychiatry, that falls apart when mapping abnormalities at the level of the individual patient. In this thesis we present a workable route towards precision medicine in psychiatry after a general introduction to pattern recognition methodology in the context of mental disorders. Further, we address the main challenges the field confronted in the last twenty years and present an outlook on the future by introducing two principles a refinement by integration and heterogeneity mapping.