About this Research Topic
Psychotherapy is the first-line treatment for many mental disorders, but a substantial share of patients do not benefit from it. Precision psychotherapy, i.e. tailoring the treatment to individual patient characteristics bears high potential for improving therapy outcomes. In recent years, interest in “what works for whom and why” resurged with profound mechanism-based interventional research, as well as the advent of big data and machine learning approaches that came with the promise of supporting evidence-based and data-driven clinical decision-making on the level of the individual patient. However, this research is still in its infancy and mostly at the stage of initial promising proof-of-concept works.
This Research Topic aims to move the field beyond initial proof-of-concept work and closer to actual clinical implementation. We are interested in publishing papers working on the translation of mechanism-based research into innovative (experimental) interventions for patients, and on the development, optimization, or replication of predictive models. This includes both first patient studies investigating innovative interventions, and work comparing different predictive models or different types of input data for prediction or the predictive value of previously not considered data types. Additionally, manuscripts that address key methodological challenges in the field, or explore research questions surrounding clinical use, such as health economic analyses or implementation strategies, are highly welcome.
Topics could include:
- Research focused on the translation of mechanism-based research into innovative intervention,e.g. neurostimulation.
-Studies aiming to predict treatment outcome before treatment initialization or at different stages of therapy, to predict the relative advantage of one treatment compared to alternatives, or to predict clinically relevant events (such as suicide attempts or relapse)
-Studies refining or evaluating previously published predictive models
-Research on methodological challenges on prediction and biomarker studies and machine learning
- Health economic analyses on the precision psychotherapy such as cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analyses
- Papers on the implementation of precision psychotherapy approaches in clinical practice
- Strategies and applications for personalization of digital mental health interventions
- Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (following the PRISMA Guidelines) on the aforementioned topics
- Publication of suitable datasets, e.g. as benchmark for ML analysis pipelines
This Research Topic aims to move the field beyond initial proof-of-concept work and closer to actual clinical implementation. We are interested in publishing papers working on the translation of mechanism-based research into innovative (experimental) interventions for patients, and on the development, optimization, or replication of predictive models. This includes both first patient studies investigating innovative interventions, and work comparing different predictive models or different types of input data for prediction or the predictive value of previously not considered data types. Additionally, manuscripts that address key methodological challenges in the field, or explore research questions surrounding clinical use, such as health economic analyses or implementation strategies, are highly welcome.
Topics could include:
- Research focused on the translation of mechanism-based research into innovative intervention,e.g. neurostimulation.
-Studies aiming to predict treatment outcome before treatment initialization or at different stages of therapy, to predict the relative advantage of one treatment compared to alternatives, or to predict clinically relevant events (such as suicide attempts or relapse)
-Studies refining or evaluating previously published predictive models
-Research on methodological challenges on prediction and biomarker studies and machine learning
- Health economic analyses on the precision psychotherapy such as cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analyses
- Papers on the implementation of precision psychotherapy approaches in clinical practice
- Strategies and applications for personalization of digital mental health interventions
- Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (following the PRISMA Guidelines) on the aforementioned topics
- Publication of suitable datasets, e.g. as benchmark for ML analysis pipelines
Keywords: Precision Psychotherapy, Treatment
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
