Neuroimaging has been widely used to evaluate brain activities as well as how the brain gets affected by other activities. According to the University of Utah, neuroimaging is a medical imaging branch that specifically focuses on the brain.
While this technology has been seen to hold remarkable potential when it comes to mental health conditions and unusual brain activity, there are still obstacles that specialists must overcome in order to use the technology as a diagnostic tool for PTSD and other psychiatric conditions. Such a gap was seen in a recent study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which was conducted by a team from Yale University.
Could Neuroimaging Be a Diagnostic Tool?
The research reveals the need to conduct even more neuroimaging developments and research in order to make it more suitable for psychiatric diagnosis.
SciTechDaily reports that years ago, a research project worth billions of dollars was initiated by the National Institutes of Mental Health. The project aimed to pinpoint brain activity biomarkers that show the physiological grounds of different psychiatric conditions. At present, these conditions are diagnosed through clinical assessments based on the patient's reported symptoms. Such symptoms tend to overlap.
Senior author Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, a psychiatry and psychology professor from Yale, expresses that the main point is to forget diagnosis via symptoms and look for the actual biological markers or causes of the condition.
The team tried to replicate the findings of an earlier study on neuroimaging. In this previous study, scientists from Harvard and Emory connected brain activity clusters with different outcomes for patients who were sent to emergency departments due to traumatic incidents. When the scientists gauged brain activity while simple activities were being performed, they observed a particular brain activity cluster that had high levels of reactivity toward rewarding and threatening signals. These also seemed to serve as a predictor for more severe PTSD symptoms.
When the specialists looked into neuroimaging findings from survivors of traumatic events in Israel, these findings were not replicated. Though various brain activity clusters were observed in the prior study, they did not see any link with PTSD.
Neuroimaging Gaps
Author and postdoctoral associate Ziv Ben-Zion expresses that this does not mean that one is right while the other is wrong. This incongruence just implies that there is a need to conduct further work in order to come up with models that are reliable and that could be generalized through various studies.
The Yale team is currently partnering with the original investigators from the Emory-Harvard study in order to mix the two different datasets. They are doing so to look for common brain activity patterns that are linked to various trauma responses.
Professor Harpaz-Rotem says that it took around a hundred years for current mental illness classifications to come into being. However, they have only spent a decade looking into biomarkers for psychiatric diagnoses. This just shows that neuroimaging and scientists have quite a long way to go.
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