CInvestigation of Brain Volume and Brain Regions’ Fractal Dimension in Healthy and ADHD Children: A Structural MRI Study

Abstract

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is one of the most common cognitive disorders in children. One of the challenges in today's research is to propose an index to distinguish people with ADHD from healthy subjects. Behavioral indices, EEG features, MRI, and fMRI characteristics have been investigated between these groups. However, there are still many competitions to find the differences between the two groups. In the current study, using MRI data, we investigated brain volume and fractal dimension of different brain regions in two groups of ADHD and healthy children. We used a database of Peking University located on the ADHD-200 Global Competition website. This dataset includes the structural MRI of 66 ADHD and healthy children with the age range of 9 to 14 years. Results showed that the structural characteristics of brain regions are significantly different between the groups (p<; 0.05). Gender also had a significant effect on the indices extracted from the structural MRI (p<; 0.05). The outcomes of the current research not only propose new features to diagnose ADHD and its subtypes but also reveal that ADHD symptoms may be because of structural differences in the brain.