Dynamic brain entropy predicts risky decision-making across transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology

Maladaptive risky decision-making is a common pathological behavior among patients with various psychiatric disorders. Brain entropy, which measures the complexity of brain time series signals, provides a novel approach to assessing brain health. Despite its potential, the dynamics of brain entropy have seldom been explored. This study aimed to construct a dynamic model of brain entropy and examine its predictive value for risky decision-making in patients with mental disorders, utilizing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI).

This study analyzed the rs-fMRI data from a total of 198 subjects, including 48 patients with bipolar disorder (BD), 47 patients with schizophrenia (SZ), 40 patients with adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as 63 healthy controls (HC). Time series signals were extracted from 264 brain regions based on rs-fMRI. The traditional static entropy and dynamic entropy (coefficient of variation, CV; rate of change, Rate) were constructed, respectively. Support vector regression was employed to predict risky decision-making utilizing leave-one-out cross-validation within each group.

Our findings showed that CV achieved the best performances in HC and BD groups (r = -0.58, MAE = 6.43, R² = 0.32; r = -0.78, MAE = 12.10, R² = 0.61), while the Rate achieved the best in SZ and ADHD groups (r = -0.69, MAE = 10.20, R² = 0.47; r = -0.78, MAE = 7.63, R² = 0.60). For the dynamic entropy, the feature selection threshold rather than the time window length and overlapping ratio influenced predictive performance.

These results suggest that dynamic brain entropy could be a more effective predictor of risky decision-making than traditional static brain entropy. Our findings offer a novel perspective on exploring brain signal complexity and can serve as a reference for interventions targeting risky decision-making behaviors, particularly in individuals with psychiatric diagnoses.