Identifying Methamphetamine Dependence Using Regional Homogeneity in BOLD Signals

Hufei Yu,Shucai Huang,Qiuping Huang,Jun Liu,Xiaojie Zhang,Hongxian Chen,Yan Tang

doi:10.1155/2020/3267949

Abstract

Methamphetamine is a highly addictive drug of abuse, which will cause a series of abnormal consequences mentally and physically. This paper is aimed at studying whether the abnormalities of regional homogeneity (ReHo) could be effective features to distinguish individuals with methamphetamine dependence (MAD) from control subjects using machine-learning methods. We made use of resting-state fMRI to measure the regional homogeneity of 41 individuals with MAD and 42 age- and sex-matched control subjects and found that compared with control subjects, individuals with MAD have lower ReHo values in the right medial superior frontal gyrus but higher ReHo values in the right temporal inferior fusiform. In addition, AdaBoost classifier, a pretty effective ensemble learning of machine learning, was employed to classify individuals with MAD from control subjects with abnormal ReHo values. By utilizing the leave-one-out cross-validation method, we got the accuracy more than 84.3%, which means we can almost distinguish individuals with MAD from the control subjects in ReHo values via machine-learning approaches. In a word, our research results suggested that the AdaBoost classifier-neuroimaging approach may be a promising way to find whether a person has been addicted to methamphetamine, and also, this paper shows that resting-state fMRI should be considered as a biomarker, a noninvasive and effective assistant tool for evaluating MAD.

Highlights

Methamphetamine is a type of synthetic stimulant that often appears white or colorless, and chronic overuse may result in dependence
Individuals with methamphetamine dependence (MAD) come from The Forced Isolation and Detoxification Center in Pingtang, Hunan Province, China. control subjects are recruited from society; we got rid of control subjects that are diagnosed with mental diseases or subjects that have
We exploited the approach of regional homogeneity (ReHo) to research resting-state fMRI data, by computing the discernible differences between the MAD group and the control group

Summary

Introduction

Methamphetamine is a type of synthetic stimulant that often appears white or colorless, and chronic overuse may result in dependence. There are many researchers claimed that chronic overuse of methamphetamine brings about adverse physical reactions and severe psychiatric symptoms, such as depressive disorder and dysthymic disorder [1, 2], mental disease [3], and cognitive deficits [4,5,6], which may attribute to the reduction of dopamine transporter density that persists after use ceases [7, 8]. The clinical diagnosis of individuals with methamphetamine dependence (MAD). Based on the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) is a useful method for the research of brain activity. We hypothesized that the abnormal areas showing in ReHo may be biomarkers for evaluating the MAD

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion