Discriminative Analysis of Brain Function in Language Circuit in Schizophrenia

Abstract

Introduction: Schizophrenia is a common psychiatric disorder that occurs at a lifetime prevalence rate of approximately 1.4 to 4.6 per 1000 worldwide population (Williamson, 2006). The accumulating evidences from clinical and neuroimaging studies, reviewed in (Li et al., 2008), suggest that structural and functional anomalies in brain language circuit underlie the characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia. We previously reported findings pointing to altered brain activations in language related regions during semantic processing in schizophrenia using voxel-based whole brain and region-of-interests (ROIs) fMRI approaches (Li et al., 2007a; 2007b). In this study, we construct the functional networks of language processing in schizophrenia and healthy controls, and seek the critical biomarkers of the onset of illness by using machine learning methods.