The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project is an initiative of personalized medicine in psychiatry developed by US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Many mental disorders may be considered as falling along multiple dimensions (e.g., cognition, mood, social interactions), with traits that exist on a continuum ranging from normal to extreme.

In order to understand mental disorders in terms of dimensions and/or components of neurobiology and behaviors, it will be important to: On April 29, 2013, a few weeks before the publication of the DSM-5, NIMH director Thomas Insel published a blog post critical of the DSM methodology and highlighting the improvement offered by the RDoC project.

Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.

His argument centers around the claim that, "symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.

[8]The RDoC matrix is one way of organizing the concepts involved, with domains as tables, constructs as rows, sub-constructs as subrows and units of analysis often presented as columns.

"[8] Official documents explain this feature, writing: "Rather than starting with an illness definition and seeking its neurobiological underpinnings, RDoC begins with current understandings of behavior-brain relationships and links them to clinical phenomena.

"[8] Unlike conventional diagnostic systems, which typically rely on self-report and behavioral measures alone, the RDoC framework has the "explicit goal" of allowing investigators access to a wider range of data.