Retrospective harmonization of neuropsychiatric questionnaires in a large multi-site research consortium using expert mappings and semantic textual similarity
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Differences between clinical questionnaires limit the pooling of symptom data across studies, particularly when participants have completed different instruments. We developed a framework that uses questionnaire item content to harmonize neuropsychiatric measures without requiring overlapping response data. Experts mapped items to shared symptom dimensions, which informed score transformation and the training of models to map new items automatically. We evaluated the framework in a multisite Parkinson’s disease sample and an independent depression cohort. Transformation improved score alignment across questionnaires, while additional analyses supported clinical relevance and cross-questionnaire convergence. Our fine-tuned embedding models performing the semantic mapping task generalize to unseen questionnaires with a mean accuracy of 85.3%. This semantic, dimensional harmonization approach supports retrospective pooling of heterogeneous questionnaire data and offers a practical and systematic path toward mega-analyses on retrospective datasets.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Julia-Katharina Pfarr, Eva van Heese, Joshua Curtiss, Max A. Laansma, Emile d'Angremont, Conor Owens-Walton, Auwal Abdullahi, Manon Auffret, Yun Jung Bae, Bhupender Kumar Bajaj, Henk Berendse, Kayleigh Beukes, Iro Boura, Thien Thanh Dang Vu, Linsey de Jong, Patricia Diaz-Galvan, Nadza Dzinalija, Tamir Eisenstein, Cristian Falup-Pecurariu, Sung-Pin Fan, Franziska Goltz, Jari Gool, Marius Gruber, Amelie Haugg, Rick Helmich, Michele T. Hu, Diana Khasanova, Mohammad Hossein Khosravi, Matthias Kirschner, Johannes C. Klein, Lea Krätzig, David E.J. Linden, Christine Lochner, Elie Matar, Gerard Mayà, David Marc Anton Mehler, Pablo Mir, Mardien Oudega, Lena Palaniyappan, Kathleen L. Poston, Mubasher A. Qamar, Paula Rehm, Jonathan Repple, Elena Rodríguez-Cano, Mirella Russo, Leon Scholz, Petra Schwingenschuh, Michael Sommerauer, Ambra Stefani, Alexander Storch, Melanie Suette, Masoud Tahmasian, Thomas Wei Jun Teo, Chih-Chien Tsai, Tim Daniël van Balkom, Margot Georgette Abel Van Cauwenberge, Karin van Dijk, eric van exel, Alban Voppel, Chris Vriend, Daniel Weintraub, Thomas Welton, Kevin Zheng, Neda Jahanshad, Paul Thompson, Ysbrand van der Werf, Odile A. van den Heuvel, Jean-Baptiste Poline
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223224185