It has been shown in the literature that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is associated with changes in brain network connectivity. Therefore, we investigate, if it is possible to capture any significant difference between brain connections of healthy subjects and ASD patients using resting-state fMRI time-series. To this end, we have developed large-scale Extended Granger Causality (lsXGC), which combines dimension reduction with source time-series augmentation and uses predictive time-series modeling for estimating directed causal relationships among resting-state fMRI time-series. This method is a multivariate approach, since it is capable of identifying the influence of each time-series on any other time-series in the presence of all other time-series of the underlying dynamic system. Here, we investigate whether this model can serve as a biomarker for classifying ASD patients from typical controls using a subset of 59 subjects of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange II (ABIDE II) data repository. In this study, we use brain connections as features for classification and estimate them by lsXGC. As a reference method, we compare our results with cross-correlation, which is typically used in the literature as a standard measure of functional connectivity. After feature extraction, we perform feature selection by Kendall’s Tau rank correlation coefficient followed by classification using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). In order to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of lsXGC, we compare its classification performance with cross-correlation. Within a cross-validation scheme of 100 different training/test data splits, we obtain a mean accuracy range of [0.7,0.81] and a mean Area Under the Receiver Operator Characteristic Curve (AUC) range of [0.78,0.85] across all tested numbers of features for lsXGC, which is significantly better than results obtained with cross-correlation namely mean accuracy of [0.57,0.61] and mean AUC of [0.54,0.59], which clearly demonstrates the applicability of lsXGC as a potential biomarker for ASD.
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common childhood neuropsychiatric disorders, with characteristic symptoms of age-inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that interfere with social and academic functioning. Recent studies have demonstrated that beyond purely neuroanatomical alterations, the disorder implies altered functional connectivity in several large-scale brain functional networks. In this study, we use the Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), which represent the population of patients and control subjects as a sparse graph. In this sparse graph, nodes are human subjects, which are associated with a brain connectivity-based feature vector, and edges are weighted using phenotypic information. We applied this framework on the large publicly available multi-institution ADHD-200 data repository of 921 resting-state functional MRI data sets. Using a 10k-fold cross-validation procedure, we obtain a mean accuracy of 76.95 and mean Area Under the receiver operating Curve (AUC) of 79.66 between typical controls and the ADHD Combined subtype. In addition, we performed classification between typical controls and all subtypes of ADHD patients, where we obtained a mean accuracy of 69.53 and mean AUC of 74.76, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the literature. Our results suggest that resting-state functional MRI analysis with GCNs may provide contributions to developing biomarkers in ADHD and other neurological disorders.
Previous studies have shown that functional brain connectivity in the Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) shows signs of atypical or delayed development. Here, we investigate the use of a nonlinear brain connectivity estimator, namely Mutual Connectivity Analysis with Local Models (MCA-LM), which estimates nonlinear interdependence of time-series pairs in terms of local cross-predictability. As a reference method, we compare MCA-LM performance with cross-correlation, which has been widely used in the functional MRI (fMRI) literature. Pairwise measures like MCA-LM and cross-correlation provide a high-dimensional representation of brain connectivity profiles and are used as features for disease identification from fMRI data. Therefore, a feature selection step is implemented by using Kendall’s Tau rank correlation coefficient for dimensionality reduction. Finally, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for classifying between subjects with ADHD and healthy controls in a Multi-Voxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA) approach on a subset of 176 subjects from the ADHD- 200 data repository. Using 100 different training/test separations and evaluating a wide range of numbers of selected features, we obtain a mean Area Under receiver operating Curve (AUC) range of [0.65,0.70] and a mean accuracy range of [0.6,0.67] for MCA-LM, which outperforms cross-correlation, which yields a mean AUC range of [0.6,0.64] and a mean accuracy range of [0.57,0.59]. Our results suggest that MCA-LM as a nonlinear measure is better suited at extracting relevant information from fMRI time-series data than the current clinical standard of cross-correlation, and may thus provide valuable contributions to the development of novel imaging biomarkers for ADHD.
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