Jianlong Zhao ¹, Jinjie Huang ², Dongmei Zhi ³, Weizheng Yan ³, Xiaohong Ma ⁴, Xiao Yang ⁴, Xianbin Li ⁵, Qing Ke ⁶, Tianzi Jiang ⁷, Vince D Calhoun ⁸, Jing Sui ⁹ 

¹Department of Automation, Harbin University of Science and Technology, Harbin, 150080, China; Brainnetome Center and National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.

²Department of Automation, Harbin University of Science and Technology, Harbin, 150080, China.

³Brainnetome Center and National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.

⁴Psychiatric Laboratory and Mental Health Center, the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, West China Hospital of Sichuan, 610041, China; Huaxi Brain Research Center, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, 610041, China.

⁵Beijing Key Lab of Mental Disorders, Beijing Anding Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.

⁶Department of Neurology, the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

⁷Brainnetome Center and National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China; CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.

⁸Tri-Institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) Center, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA.

⁹Brainnetome Center and National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China; CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.

Abstract 

As a popular deep learning method, generative adversarial networks (GAN) have achieved outstanding performance in multiple classifications and segmentation tasks. However, the application of GANs to fMRI data is relatively rare. In this work, we proposed a functional network connectivity (FNC) based GAN for classifying psychotic disorders from healthy controls (HCs), in which FNC matrices were calculated by correlation of time courses derived from non-artefactual fMRI independent components (ICs). The proposed GAN model consisted of one discriminator (real FNCs) and one generator (fake FNCs), each has four fully-connected layers. The generator was trained to match the discriminator in the intermediate layers while simultaneously a new objective loss was determined for the generator to improve the whole classification performance. In a case for classifying 269 major depressive disorder (MDD) patients from 286 HCs, an average accuracy of 70.1% was achieved in 10-fold cross-validation, with at least 6% higher compared to the other 6 popular classification approaches (54.5–64.2%). In another application to discriminating 558 schizophrenia patients from 542 HCs from 7 sites, the proposed GAN model achieved 80.7% accuracy in leave-one-site-out prediction, outperforming support vector machine (SVM) and deep neural net (DNN) by 3%–6%. More importantly, we are able to identify the most contributing FNC nodes and edges with the strategy of leave-one-FNC-out recursively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply the GAN model on the FNC-based classification of mental disorders. Such a framework promises wide utility and great potential in neuroimaging biomarker identification.

Keywords: Classification; Deep learning; Generative adversarial networks (GAN); Major depressive disorders; Resting-state fMRI; Schizophrenia.