Schizophrenia-Mimicking Layers Outperform Conventional Neural Network Layers

We have reported nanometer-scale three-dimensional studies of brain networks of schizophrenia cases and found that their neurites are thin and tortuous when compared to healthy controls. This suggests that connections between distal neurons are suppressed in microcircuits of schizophrenia cases. In this study, we applied these biological findings to the design of a schizophrenia-mimicking artificial neural network to simulate the observed connection alteration in the disorder. Neural networks that have a "schizophrenia connection layer" in place of a fully connected layer were subjected to image classification tasks using the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. The results revealed that the schizophrenia connection layer is tolerant to overfitting and outperforms a fully connected layer. The outperformance was observed only for networks using band matrices as weight windows, indicating that the shape of the weight matrix is relevant to the network performance. A schizophrenia convolution layer was also tested using the VGG configuration, showing that 60% of the kernel weights of the last three convolution layers can be eliminated without loss of accuracy. The schizophrenia layers can be used instead of conventional layers without any change in the network configuration and training procedures; hence, neural networks can easily take advantage of these layers. The results of this study suggest that the connection alteration found in schizophrenia is not a burden to the brain, but has functional roles in brain performance.