Bringing Imaging Biomarkers Into Clinical Reality in Psychiatry

ImportanceAdvancing precision psychiatry, where treatments are based on an individual’s biology rather than solely their clinical presentation, requires attention to several key attributes for any candidate biomarker. These include test-retest reliability, sensitivity to relevant neurophysiology, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. Unfortunately, these issues have not been systematically addressed by biomarker development efforts that use common neuroimaging tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). Here, the critical barriers that neuroimaging methods will need to overcome to achieve clinical relevance in the near to intermediate term are examined.ObservationsReliability is often overlooked, which together with sensitivity to key aspects of neurophysiology and replicated predictive utility, favors EEG-based methods. The principal barrier for EEG has been the lack of large-scale data collection among multisite psychiatric consortia. By contrast, despite its high reliability, structural MRI has not demonstrated clinical utility in psychiatry, which may be due to its limited sensitivity to psychiatry-relevant neurophysiology. Given the prevalence