A novel MSN-II feature extracted from T1-weighted MRI for discriminating between BD patients and MDD patients

Differentiating between patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) is clinically challenging. This study aimed to explore the potential of radiomic textural features for discriminating BD and MDD.

A total 253 subjects (114 patients with BD, 139 patients with MDD) with T1-weighted MRI data were recruited. Radiomics features and gray matter volume (GMV) features were extracted from each brain region. A novel high-level MSN_II feature method based on radiomic features was proposed. And a total of 21 MSN features (5 MSN_I and 16 MSN_II) based on different combinations of the 5 types of radiomic textural feature were calculated. Classification models were constructed using various combinations of MSNs or GMV, and their performance and stability was evaluated through 2000 repeated experiments.

The model built with combined features (GMV and GMV + MSN_II_GLCM_GLSZM_NGTDM) showed the best classification performance (AUC = 0.896±0.058, ACC = 0.831±0.064) in the validation cohort. After MANOVA analysis and FDR correlation, the MSN_II_GLCM_GLSZM_NGTDM values in 4 regions (right rectus gyrus, right temporal pole: middle temporal gyrus, Vermis3 and Vermis10) showed significant difference between BD and MDD.

The main limitation of this study is that the data is derived from a single center without an external independent test set.

Incorporating the high-level MSN_II based on radiomics features can improve the classification performance compared to models solely relying on GMV features alone. This result implied the potential application of the proposed high level MSN method and radiomics textural features on the MDD and BD clinical studies.