Female Sexual Dysfunction is in fact a group of disorders that may be subdivided into sexual desire disorders, sexual arousal disorder, orgasmic disorder and sexual pain disorders (such as dyspareunia and vaginismus). Most common are Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) and Female Sexual Arousal Disorder (FSAD).

FSD research in ATIA

Within the Alan Turing Institute Almere, we believe that all these factors should be taken into account when dealing with this problem. Therefore, we are using existing measures of sexual functioning in women, developing new measures and we will use advanced reasoning software to identify the different underlying mechanisms. Our focus will be on dividing the FSD population into subgroups. It is hypothesized that there may be a FSD subgroup that consists of women with relatively little interest in sex and no particular negative association with it. A second group, however, does have this negative association, possibly due to a history of sexual abuse. Emotional Brain, a research company in Almere, has developed two potential drugs for FSD. It is believed that each drug may particularly benefit one FSD subgroup. In collaboration with Emotional Brain, ATIA will evaluate the predictive power of measures of physiological responding (measuring genital blood flow), subjective experience (questionnaires), motivation (EEG data), etc. These measures reflect different (sub)domains and most likely interact with each other. However, the amount of data and its complexity can thus become overwhelming. Integrating these data using advanced reasoning software, based on artificial intelligence technology, could provide a solution. A reasoning engine can trace unseen correlations, inconsistencies and generate new hypotheses. These can be tested using the actual data.

Instead of administering a single drug to a heterogeneous group of women, attempting to chart the underlying mechanisms of the problems and tailoring drug intervention will substantially improve drug efficacy.