Research on Functional Brain Network Metrics for Depression Patients Automatic Identification

Abstract

Nowadays, Brain network as a means of emerging brain disease research has been fully recognized which is applied to the neurological diseases, such as major depressive disorder (MDD). It also can detect the exception of the whole brain network topological. But there is no evidence to prove that abnormal brain network topology metrics can be an effective feature in the classification model to distinguish the healthy control and MDD. So, we hypothesize the abnormal brain network topology metrics can be used as an valid classification feature. Resting state functional brain networks were constructed for 26 healthy controls and 34 MDD patients by thresholding partial correlation matrices of 90 regions. According to the theory-based approaches, the global and local metrics were calculated. Non-parametric permutation tests were then used for group comparisons of topological metrics, which were used as classified features in support vector machine algorithm. The current study demonstrate that MDD is associated with abnormal function brain network topological metrics and statistically significance network metrics can be successfully used for feature selection in classification algorithms.