Detection of Major Depressive Disorder from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Using Regional Homogeneity and Feature/Sample Selective Evolving Voting Ensemble Approaches

TL;DR

This study uses brain imaging and a new machine learning method to detect major depressive disorder with high accuracy and identifies key brain regions involved.

Contribution

A novel feature/sample selective evolving voting ensemble approach is proposed for detecting major depressive disorder from fMRI data.

Findings

The proposed method achieved 91.93% accuracy in detecting major depressive disorder.

Nine brain regions were identified as critical for detecting major depressive disorder.

Regional homogeneity features from fMRI data were effectively used for classification.

Abstract

Major depressive disorder is a mental illness characterized by persistent sadness or loss of interest that affects a person’s daily life. Early detection of this disorder is crucial for providing timely and effective treatment. Neuroimaging modalities, namely, functional magnetic resonance imaging, can be used to identify changes in brain regions related to major depressive disorder. In this study, regional homogeneity images, one of the derivative of functional magnetic resonance imaging is employed to detect major depressive disorder using the proposed feature/sample evolving voting ensemble approach. A total of 2380 subjects consisting of 1104 healthy controls and 1276 patients with major depressive disorder from Rest-meta-MDD consortium are studied. Regional homogeneity features from 90 regions are extracted using automated anatomical labeling template. These regional homogeneity features are then fed as an input to the proposed feature/sample selective evolving voting ensemble for classification. The proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 91.93%, and discriminative features obtained from the classifier are used to identify brain regions which may be responsible for major depressive disorder. A total of nine brain regions, namely, left superior temporal gyrus, left postcentral gyrus, left anterior cingulate gyrus, right inferior parietal lobule, right superior medial frontal gyrus, left lingual gyrus, right putamen, left fusiform gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus, are identified. This study clearly indicates that these brain regions play a critical role in detecting major depressive disorder.

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