Computer analysis of MRI brain scans could could help predict how severe the future illness course of a patient with psychosis will be and how best to treat patients, according to research by King’s College London and University College London.

They took MRI brain scans of patients when they presented to clinical services with a first psychotic episode. In addition, the researchers scanned the brains of a control group of 91 healthy individuals. The patients were followed up around six years later and classified as having developed a continuous, episodic, or intermediate illness course, depending on whether their symptoms remitted or not during this time.

They used these scans as data to “train”  software, based on pattern recognition, to distinguish between the different severities of the illness. The algorithm, when applied to the scans collected at the first episode of psychosis, was able to differentiate between patients who then went on to develop continuous psychosis and those who went on to develop a more benign, episodic psychosis in seven out of ten cases.

Ref.: J. Mourao-Miranda, et al., Individualized prediction of illness course at the first psychotic episode: a support vector machine MRI study, Psychological Medicine, 2011; [DOI:10.1017/S0033291711002005]