Diagnosing schizophrenia with network analysis and a machine learning method

Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating neuropsychiatric disorder. It has been suggested that impaired brain connectivity underlies the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Network analysis has thus recently emerged in the field of schizophrenia research.

We investigated 48 schizophrenia patients and 24 healthy controls using network analysis and a machine learning method. A number of global and nodal network properties were estimated from graphs that were reconstructed using probabilistic brain tractography. These network properties were then compared between groups and used for machine learning to classify schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.

In classifying schizophrenia patients and healthy controls via network properties, the support vector machine, random forest, naïve Bayes, and gradient boosting machine learning models showed an encouraging level of performance. The overall connectivity was revealed as the most significant contributing feature to this classification among the global network properties. Among the nodal network properties, although the relative importance of each region of interest was not identical, there were still some patterns.

In conclusion, the possibility exists to classify schizophrenia patients and healthy controls using network properties, and we have found that there is a provisional pattern of involved brain regions among patients with schizophrenia.