The central theme of the 107^th Annual Meeting of the JSPN, 2011, in Tokyo is that climbing to the summit of a mountain often provides a new view towards a continuous series of mountain summits yet to be attained. In the same way, highly specialized medical psychiatry may be realized through solving clinical problems one after another. Therefore, I would like to talk about developing technical innovation in the practice of medical psychiatry in this address. A central problem is that in the absence of objective diagnostic biomarkers for mental disorders, psychiatrists depend on subjective examinations in order to properly diagnose their patients. Many researchers have studied genetics and investigated objective tools such as magnetic resonance imaging for use as diagnostic markers to aid subjective examinations. None of these findings,however,have been replicated consistently enough to merit widespread clinical use. These controversial results are mainly due to currently no gold standard of psychiatric diagnoses.
 In Japan,however,a Near Infrared Spectroscopy（NIRS）technique has been exclusively approved by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare as one of dozens of the Advanced Medical Technology to assist in the differential diagnoses of depressive states, although it should be necessary to accumulate the more supportive evidence to prove clinical usefulness. Additionally,the subjective examinations based on traditional psychopathology are still used clinically in Japan as well as ICD-10 and DSM-IV. To offer better care to people with mental-health problems, we should continue the search for more conventional biomarkers. Techniques such as NIRS combined with other diagnostic techniques,could be a powerful tool to aid in subjective examinations, as part of a continuing progress in the direction of technical innovation in the field of medical psychiatry.