Project Rosetta: a childhood social, emotional, and behavioral developmental feature mapping

BACKGROUND: A wide array of existing instruments are commonly used to assess childhood behavior and development for the evaluation of social, emotional and behavioral disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and anxiety. Many of these instruments either focus on one diagnostic category or encompass a broad set of childhood behaviors. We analyze a wide range of standardized behavioral instruments and identify a comprehensive, structured semantic hierarchical grouping of child behavioral observational features. We use the hierarchy to create Rosetta: a new set of behavioral assessment questions, designed to be minimal yet comprehensive in its coverage of clinically relevant behaviors. We maintain a full mapping from every functional feature in every covered instrument to a corresponding question in Rosetta. RESULTS: In all, 209 Rosetta questions are shown to cover all the behavioral concepts targeted in the eight existing standardized instruments. CONCLUSION: The resulting hierarchy 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.