Synopsis

Psychiatric disorders traditionally have been classified as broad syndromes defined by symptoms rather than underlying neurobiologic substrate. The ability to visualize and quantify brain function, in vivo, noninvasively, is particularly important for psychiatric disorders. Recently, BOLD-fMRI has been widely used to identify brain functional or physiologic abnormalities in patients with psychiatric disorders. This lecture will introduce how the BOLD-fMRI can help us know more about psychiatric disorders in terms of mechanism, prediction and classification. This understanding will lay a foundation for building imaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.