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.

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.