Artificial intelligence for precision medicine in neurodevelopmental disorders

The ambition of precision medicine is to design and optimize the pathway for diagnosis, therapeutic intervention, and prognosis by using large multidimensional biological datasets that capture individual variability in genes, function and environment. This offers clinicians the opportunity to more carefully tailor early interventions— whether treatment or preventative in nature—to each individual patient. Taking advantage of high performance computer capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can now achieve reasonable success in predicting risk in certain cancers and cardiovascular disease from available multidimensional clinical and biological data. In contrast, less progress has been made with the neurodevelopmental disorders, which include intellectual disability (ID), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), epilepsy and broader neurodevelopmental disorders. Much hope is pinned on the opportunity to quantify risk from patterns of genomic variation, including the functional characterization of genes and variants, but this ambition is confounded by phenotypic and etiologic heterogeneity, along with the rare and variable penetrant nature of the underlying risk variants identified so far. Structural and functional brain imaging and neuropsychological and neurophysiological markers may provide further dimensionality, but often require more development to achieve sensitivity for diagnosis. Herein, therefore, lies a precision medicine conundrum: can artificial intelligence offer a breakthrough in predicting risks and prognosis for neurodevelopmental disorders? In this review we will examine these complexities, and consider some of the strategies whereby artificial intelligence may overcome them.