Multivariate analyses of multi-modal data like UK Biobank enable discovery of (potentially complex) clinical phenotypes. This is a powerful alternative to diagnostic categories that rely on clinical symptoms which do not map cleanly onto underlying disease mechanisms. For many complex diseases, the discovery of distinct mechanisms/sub-diseases that are currently conflated may be unlikely to occur solely through symptom-based investigations. Discovering relevant population axes and sub-groups based on imaging, genetics and other objective markers may therefore be expected to increase our understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis of a wide variety of diseases. For example, this concept is at the heart of the recently-proposed Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) in psychiatry48.
