McLean’s Justin Baker on Behavioral Forecasting Using N-of-1 Designs (TIPS 2018)

From planetary science to meteorology to economics, forecasting future events accurately often marks an important milestone in the development of a technology or science, where uncertainty is gradually reduced, either through trial-and-error or often, by increasingly granular mechanistic understanding of the system. In some sense the holy grail of a technology-based approach to psychiatry, understanding the brain and human behavior with sufficient precision to accurately forecast future properties of a neural circuit or of a human being undergoing treatment for a mental health condition would transform our ability to tailor illness monitoring, circuit-based interventions, and care delivery based on those predictions. In this session, our panelists will discuss their own work and where the field of forecasting mental health outcomes is likely headed over the next 2-5 years.

These remarks were part of the 2018 Technology in Psychiatry Summit, an event sponsored by the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry, which occurred November 1-2, 2018 at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.

Justin T. Baker, MD, PhD, is the scientific director of the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry. He also serves as director of Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics for the Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research Program at McLean, and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His work aims to develop efficient strategies to monitor and intervene the course of mental illness.

Please visit mclean.org/itp to learn more about the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry.