TAPAS: An Open-Source Software Package for Translational Neuromodeling and Computational Psychiatry

Area of Science:

• Computational neuroscience
• Psychiatric research
• Clinical informatics

Background:

• Psychiatry struggles with mechanism-guided diagnosis and predicting patient outcomes.
• Translational Neuromodeling (TN) and Computational Psychiatry (CP) aim to address these challenges using computational assays.
• Objective clinical tools require robust end-to-end data processing pipelines.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce the Translational Algorithms for Psychiatry-Advancing Science (TAPAS) software package.
• Provide open-source building blocks for creating computational assays in psychiatry.
• Facilitate the development of automated pipelines for patient-specific predictions.

Main Methods:

• Development of an open-source software package (TAPAS).
• Inclusion of tools for experimental design, data acquisition quality control, and post-acquisition processing (artifact correction, statistical inference).
• Review and illustration of TAPAS tools for understanding neural and cognitive mechanisms of psychiatric disorders.

Main Results:

• TAPAS provides a collection of tools covering key stages of the computational assay pipeline.
• The software supports tailored experimental designs and data processing.
• Tools are available for quality control, artifact correction, and statistical inference.

Conclusions:

• TAPAS offers a foundational set of tools to advance Translational Neuromodeling and Computational Psychiatry.
• The package aims to bridge the gap between computational neuroscience research and clinical application.
• Openly available tools like TAPAS are crucial for developing reliable, automated clinical prediction pipelines.