ADHD classification by a texture analysis of anatomical brain MRI data

Che-Wei Chang, Chien-Chang Ho, Jyh-Horng Chen

The ADHD-200 Global Competition provides an excellent opportunity for building diagnostic classifiers of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) based on resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) and structural MRI data. Here, we introduce a simple method to classify ADHD based on morphological information without using functional data. Our test results show that the accuracy of this approach is competitive with methods based on rs-fMRI data. We used isotropic local binary patterns on three orthogonal planes (LBP-TOP) to extract features from MR brain images. Subsequently, support vector machines (SVM) were used to develop classification models based on the extracted features. In this study, a total of 436 male subjects (210 with ADHD and 226 controls) were analyzed to show the discriminative power of the method. To analyze the properties of this approach, we tested disparate LBP-TOP features from various parcellations and different image resolutions. Additionally, morphological information using a single brain tissue type (i.e., gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), and CSF) was tested. The highest accuracy we achieved was 0.6995. The LBP-TOP was found to provide better discriminative power using whole-brain data as the input. Datasets with higher resolution can train models with increased accuracy. The information from GM plays a more important role than that of other tissue types. These results and the properties of LBP-TOP suggest that most of the disparate feature distribution comes from different patterns of cortical folding. Using LBP-TOP, we provide an ADHD classification model based only on anatomical information, which is easier to obtain in the clinical environment and which is simpler to preprocess compared with rs-fMRI data.