Individualized psychiatric imaging based on inter-subject neural synchronization in movie watching

Publication date: Available online 27 September 2019Source: NeuroImageAuthor(s): Zhi Yang, Jinfeng Wu, Lihua Xu, Zhengzheng Deng, Yingying Tang, Jiaqi Gao, Yang Hu, Yiwen Zhang, Shaozheng Qin, Chunbo Li, Jijun WangAbstractThe individual heterogeneity is a challenge to the prosperous promises of cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques for better diagnosis and early detection of psychiatric disorders. Individuals with similar clinical manifestations may result from very different pathophysiology. Conventional approaches based on comparing the group-averages provide insufficient information to support the individualized diagnosis. Here we present an individualized imaging methodology that combines naturalistic imaging and the normative model. Using video clips with rich cognitive, social, and emotional contents, this paradigm aims to evoke synchronized brain dynamics of healthy participants and build a spatiotemporal response norm. Comparing individual brain responses with the response norm, we could recognize patients using machine learning techniques. We applied this methodology to recognize first-episode drug-naïve schizophrenia patients in a dataset containing 72 patients and 54 healthy controls. Some segments of the video evoked more synchronized brain activity in the healthy controls than in the schizophrenia patients. We built a spatiotemporal response norm by averaging the brain responses of the healthy controls in a training set, and trained a classifier to recognize pati...

Source: NeuroImage - October 13, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research