Affinity scores: An individual-centric fingerprinting framework for neuropsychiatric disorders

Population-centric frameworks of biomarker identification for psychiatric disorders focus primarily on comparing averages between groups and assume that diagnostic groups are (1) mutually-exclusive, and (2) homogeneous. There is a paucity of individual-centric approaches capable of identifying individual-specific 'fingerprints' across multiple domains. To address this, we propose a novel framework, combining a range of biopsychosocial markers, including brain structure, cognition, and clinical markers, into higher-level 'fingerprints', capable of capturing intra-illness heterogeneity and inter-illness overlap. A multivariate framework was implemented to identify individualised patterns of brain structure, cognition and clinical markers based on affinity to other participants in the database. First, individual-level affinity scores defined each participant's "neighbourhood" across each measure based on variable-specific hop sizes. Next, diagnostic verification and classification algorithms were implemented based on multivariate affinity score profiles. To perform affinity-based classification, data were divided into training and test samples, and 5-fold nested cross-validation was performed on the training data. Affinity-based classification was compared to weighted K-nearest neighbours (KNN) classification. The framework was applied to the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank (ASRB) dataset, which included data from individuals with chronic and treatment resistant schizophrenia and healthy controls. Individualised affinity scores provided a 'fingerprint' of brain structure, cognition, and clinical markers, which described the affinity of an individual to the representative groups in the dataset. Diagnostic verification capability was moderate to high depending on the choice of multivariate affinity metric. Affinity score-based classification achieved a high degree of accuracy in the training, nested cross-validation and prediction steps, and outperformed KNN classification in the training and test datasets. Affinity scores demonstrate utility in two keys ways: (1) Early and accurate diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders, whereby an individual can be grouped within a diagnostic category/ies that best matches their fingerprint, and (2) identification of biopsychosocial factors that most strongly characterise individuals/disorders, and which may be most amenable to intervention.