Regional structural characterization of the brain of schizophrenia patients

We study morphologic characteristics and age-related changes in patients with schizophrenia to investigate whether abnormal neurodevelopment and brain structure have a role in the pathophysiological course of this disease.

Our data consist of a set of cranial magnetic resonance images of 46 patients with schizophrenia and age- and sex-matched healthy controls. We deformed a template brain image to our set of subject images. Jacobian fields of these deformations were reduced to sets of 52 normalized region volumes for each subject by using a neuroanatomic atlas. Normalized regional volumes of the control and patient groups were compared by using Student t-test, and age correlation of each region volume was calculated for the two groups. All results were corrected for multiple comparisons by using permutation testing. We used a classifier based on support vector machines and a feature selection method to determine our ability to discriminate brains of controls from those of patients.

Analysis of normalized region volumes shows enlargement of the third ventricle in patients. The age-correlation study showed a significant positive correlation in the third ventricle and right thalamus of controls, but not patients. Using an average of 6.5 features, our classifier was able to correctly identify 72% of patients and 70% of controls.

In addition to enlargement of the third ventricle, brains of patients with schizophrenia show a different pattern of age-related changes.