Integrating an ontology for RDOC with existing biomedical ontologies

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is an initiative developed by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to guide research and facilitate better communication about mental disorders, and psychopathology in general. Recent advances in neuroscience have not offered significant improvement in treatment modalities and patient care for people afflicted with mental health problems. The RDoC project is an attempt to address the heterogeneity of diagnostic categorizations and the lack of progress in research into the neurobiological foundations of mental disorders. The core of RDoC is based on a Matrix in which functional aspects of behavior, named Constructs, are related to genetic, neurological, and phenotypic research findings, along with the various assays, self-reports and paradigms that generate the data used to make such findings. The RDoC Matrix suffers from several problems, which need to addressed before it can deliver on the NIMH’s long-term goals of fostering translational research via the broad sharing of data relevant to psychopathology. One of the most difficult challenges for RDoC is in providing researchers and users of the Matrix a formalized unambiguous way of linking findings in genetics, molecular biology, and neuroscience to the constructs for which they are thought to be associated. The purpose of this paper is to discuss those challenges. We expand our previous analysis of the RDoC matrix and introduce an ontological representation of the Constructs, the RDoC Ontology (RDoCOn), that provides a method for incorporating the RDoC framework with current biomedical ontologies. We demonstrate a way in which particular Elements in the Matrix can be usefully linked to Constructs.