The Institute for Development, Research, Advocacy and Applied Care (IDRAAC), in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology at the St Georges Hospital University Medical Center and the Faculty of Medicine at the Balamand University organized a conference by Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz entitled “Big Data and Open Science in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry” on Tuesday March 21, 2017 at 6pm at the Balamand University in Ashrafieh – Batlouni Hall.
Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz is a world renowned Psychiatrist and is currently the President and Medical Director of the Child Mind Institute (childmind.org) in New York and the Edito-in-Chief of the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.
The conference was attended by around 70 psychologists, psychiatrists, medical students and pediatricians.
You can find below the abstract of Dr. Koplewicz’ presentation:
Despite decades of research, visions of transforming child and adolescent psychiatry through the development of neuroimaging-based ‘growth charts’ or ‘lab tests’ for the brain have remained out of reach. In recent years, the maturation of pediatric brain imaging has renewed enthusiasm about the prospect of one day achieving clinically useful tools capable of aiding the diagnosis and management of neuropsychiatric disorders. A critical barrier to the realization of such ambitions is the accrual large-scale brain imaging datasets that capture the range of clinical presentations commonly encountered in the treatment of child and adolescent mental health and learning disorders. In this regard, the Child Mind Institute (CMI) is actively working to implement open science as vehicle for accelerating the pace of advancement. Dr. Koplewicz will discuss two key open science efforts being led by CMI investigators. First, the 1000 Functional Connectomes Project and its International Neuroimaging Data-sharing Initiative (INDI), which has aggregated and openly shared brain imaging datasets obtained from developing and clinical populations (e.g., ADHD, autism) that were previously collected at sites around the world. Second, the Child Mind Institute Healthy Brain Network – an ongoing data collection in the New York area that is working to create a large-scale (N = 10,000) data resource for the scientific community, which will contain comprehensive phenotyping (cognitive, behavioral, lifestyle, environment) and multimodal brain imaging datasets obtained from children with mental health and learning disorders (ages: 5-21), along with genetics. The HBN is actively working to ensure the generation of a sample capable of capturing the range of clinical heterogeneity and impairment commonly encountered in clinical practice. Dr. Koplewicz will also discuss complementary efforts focused on the creation of openly available, industry-grade software for the analysis of large-scale datasets and the recruitment of the broader scientific community in brain-based biomarker discovery.
The presentation will include key functional MRI findings that demonstrate the utility of functional MRI in helping to elucidate the neural basis of mental health and learning disorders, as well those from efforts focused on improving the quality of phenotypic characterizations of illness used in imaging studies.