Project RainFrog (code name)
Creating Personalized Digital Mental Health Interventions [ More details to come soon ]
SMART Mental Health Prediction Tournament
In the Stratified Medicine Approaches for Treatment Selection (SMART) Mental Health Prediction Tournament, 13 teams from around the world will compete to see who can build the best predictive model for anxiety and depression treatment response. Each team will be provided with the same large, anonymized mental health treatment outcome dataset from the UK’s national health system. A separate, held-out test sample will be used to determine the winner. This will provide a level playing field for evaluating each model’s efficacy, but it will also allow participants and, ultimately, the field, to understand the reasons for the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy, under different conditions. Head-to-head comparisons of the best approaches for selecting mental health treatments will, we believe, yield knowledge that can be used to maximize the efficiency of mental health care delivery in the future.
The first aim of the tournament will be to learn more about different methodological approaches to building predictive models for treatment selection in mental health. We also hope to contribute to the conversation about barriers to implementation of precision medicine approaches in real-world clinical settings, informed in part by work we will undertake with key stakeholders (service-users and clinicians) as part of this project.
The second aim is to produce an algorithm that could be used to inform treatment decisions in the UK’s IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services, with the goal of enhancing efficiency, efficacy, and service.
The best match: selecting the optimal treatment for depressed individuals.
Co-Investigator on Ellen Dreissen's Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW) Veni Grant
[ more details to come "soon" ]
DSRP (Depression Symptom Response Project)
Research on psychological and pharmacological depression treatment tracks the change of depression symptom sum-scores across time. Main results of recent meta analyses show that most treatments are roughly equally effective, and outperform placebo only in moderately-to-severely depressed patients. Many competing explanations for these findings have been proposed. For instance, antidepressants might selectively ameliorate certain symptoms while exacerbating others (i.e., side-effects). The DSRP is a mega-analysis aiming to investigate whether 1) specific symptoms respond differentially to treatment in general, and 2) whether they respond differentially to specific forms of treatment.
Card Sorting Study Information Sheet
Symptom Quantity Rating Study Information Sheet