Project Rosetta: A Childhood Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Developmental Ontology
This addresses the challenge of inconsistent and overlapping behavioral assessments for clinicians and researchers studying childhood disorders like ASD, ADHD, and anxiety, though it is incremental as it integrates existing instruments rather than introducing a new diagnostic approach.
The researchers tackled the problem of fragmented childhood behavioral assessment instruments by creating a unified ontology that maps 1274 existing questions to 209 core questions, enabling more concise instruments and robust datasets for clinical and research use.
There is a wide array of existing instruments used to assess childhood behavior and development for the evaluation of social, emotional and behavioral disorders. Many of these instruments either focus on one diagnostic category or encompass a broad set of childhood behaviors. We built an extensive ontology of the questions associated with key features that have diagnostic relevance for child behavioral conditions, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and anxiety, by incorporating a subset of existing child behavioral instruments and categorizing each question into clinical domains. Each existing question and set of question responses were then mapped to a new unique Rosetta question and set of answer codes encompassing the semantic meaning and identified concept(s) of as many existing questions as possible. This resulted in 1274 existing instrument questions mapping to 209 Rosetta questions creating a minimal set of questions that are comprehensive of each topic and subtopic. This resulting ontology can be used to create more concise instruments across various ages and conditions, as well as create more robust overlapping datasets for both clinical and research use.