Alto Neuroscience Announces Publication in Nature Neuroscience Highlighting Superiority of Data-Driven Framework for Mapping Human Neurobiology Domains

–Publication highlights first ever, most comprehensive data-driven neurobiological mapping of the mind–

–Findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, validate Alto’s rigorous high-science approach and may be translated to future drug discovery and development–

–Intellectual property has been exclusively licensed to Alto by Stanford–

Excerpt from the Press Release:

LOS ALTOS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Alto Neuroscience today announced the publication of the first ever, most comprehensive data-driven neurological mapping of the mind in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The paper, “A data-driven framework for mapping domains of human neurobiology,” demonstrates superiority of a computational approach to identify mental functions, brain circuits, and neurobiological domains.

In psychiatry, it is accepted that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is poorly predictive of treatment response. To address shortcomings, an expert-driven National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) framework called the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project launched to map brain circuits, behaviors, and other units of analysis. However, how well either DSM or RDoC systematically capture findings from human brain data is unknown, nor whether an unbiased data-driven framework can be discovered that best matches models of mind to biology of the brain. To address these questions, a neuroimaging meta-analysis of 18,155 human brain imaging studies was conducted, encompassing findings from all available papers published on the topic over the past three decades. By applying natural language processing (NLP) on the full content of these papers and machine learning, a superior data-driven framework was developed which also outperformed both DSM and RDoC.

“For decades, functional neuroimaging has been the mainstay for understanding how mental processes relate to brain activity. This existing approach is inherently limited because it uses mental constructs defined decades ago as the premise of brain mapping rather than clear, objective criteria,” said Amit Etkin, M.D., Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of Alto. “In an attempt to better classify and treat psychiatric disease, we examined and synthesized neuroimaging texts and data to develop a working model that effectively translates how the brain and its mental domains interconnect.”

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