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Abstract Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is characterized by deficits in attention, hyperactivity, and/or impulsivity. Resting-state functional connectivity analysis has emerged as a promising approach for ADHD classification using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), although with limited accuracy. Recent studies have highlighted dynamic changes in functional connectivity patterns among ADHD children. In this study, we introduce Skip-Vote-Net, a novel deep learning-based network designed for classifying ADHD from typically developing children (TDC) by leveraging dynamic connectivity analysis on rs-fMRI data collected from 222 participants included in the NYU dataset within the ADHD-200 database. Initially, for each subject, functional connectivity matrices were constructed from overlapping segments using Pearson’s correlation between mean time series of 116 regions of interest defined by the Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) 116 atlas. Skip-Vote-Net was then developed, employing a majority voting mechanism to classify ADHD/TDC children, as well as distinguishing between the two main subtypes: the inattentive subtype (ADHDI) and the predominantly combined subtype (ADHDC). The proposed method was evaluated across four classification scenarios: (1) two-class classification of ADHD from TD children using balanced data, (2) two-class classification between ADHD and TD children using unbalanced data, (3) two-class classification between ADHDI and ADHDC, and (4) three-class classification among ADHDI, ADHDC, and TD children. Using Skip-Vote-Net, we achieved mean classification accuracies of 97% ± 1.87 and 97.7% ± 2.2 for the balanced and unbalanced classification cases, respectively. Furthermore, the mean classification accuracy for discriminating between ADHDI and ADHDC reached 99.4% ± 1.21. Finally, the proposed method demonstrated an average accuracy of 98.86% ± 1.03 in classifying ADHDI, ADHDC, and TD children collectively. Our findings highlight the superior performance of Skip-Vote-Net over existing methods in the classification of ADHD, showcasing its potential as an effective diagnostic tool for identifying ADHD subtypes and distinguishing ADHD from typically developing children.

Abstract Developing advanced systems for 3D brain tissue segmentation from neonatal magnetic resonance (MR) images is vital for newborn structural analysis. However, automatic segmentation of neonatal brain tissues is challenging due to smaller head size and inverted T1/T2 tissue contrast compared to adults. In this work, a subject-specific atlas based technique is presented for segmentation of gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from neonatal MR images. It involves atlas selection, subject-specific atlas creation using random forest (RF) classifier, and brain tissue segmentation using the expectation maximization-Markov random field (EM-MRF) method. To increase the segmentation accuracy, different tissue intensity- and gradient-based features were used. Evaluation on 40 neonatal MR images (gestational age of 37–44 weeks) demonstrated an overall accuracy of 94.3% and an average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.945 (GM), 0.947 (WM), and 0.912 (CSF). Compared to multi-atlas segmentation methods like SEGMA and EM-MRF with multiple atlases, our method improved accuracy by up to 4%, particularly in complex tissue regions. Our proposed method allows accurate brain tissue segmentation, a crucial step in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) applications including brain surface reconstruction and realistic head model creation in neonates.

Abstract Cannabis is one of the most used and commodified illicit substances worldwide, especially among young adults. The neurobiology mechanism of cannabis is yet to be identified particularly in youth. The purpose of this study was to concurrently measure alterations in brain structural and functional connectivity in cannabis users using resting-state functional magnetic resonance images (rs-fMRI) and diffusion-weighted images (DWI) from a group of 73 cannabis users (age 22–36, 19 female) in comparison with 73 healthy controls (age 22–36, 14 female) from Human Connectome Project (HCP). Several significant differences were observed in local structural/functional network measures (e.g. degree and clustering coefficient), being prominent in the insular and frontal opercular cortex and lateral/medial temporal cortex. The rich-club organization of structural networks revealed a normal trend, distributed within bilateral frontal, temporal and occipital regions. However, minor differences were found between the two groups in the superior and inferior temporal gyri. Functional rich-club nodes were mostly located within parietal and posterior areas, with minor differences between the groups found mainly in the centro-temporal and parietal regions. Regional network measures of structural/functional networks were associated with times used cannabis (TUC) in several regions. Although the structural/functional network in both groups showed small-world property, no differences between cannabis users and healthy controls were found regarding the global network measures, showing no association with cannabis use. After FDR correction, all of the significant associations between network measures and TUC were found to be insignificant, except for the association between degree and TUC within the presubiculum region. To recap, our findings revealed alterations in local topological properties of structural and functional networks in cannabis users, although their global brain network organization remained intact.

Objectives: Military personnel are unique occupational groups who happen to frequently experience sleep insuffciencies. Since sleep disorders are known to be linked to many psychiatric symptoms, sleep disturbance is a salient concern among active duty service members and veterans. Existing evidence indicates that although sleep disturbances co-occur with mental illnesses, there is a tendency to particularly label them as consequences of certain mental health issues. Material and Methods: This review focuses on the emerging evidence which identifies sleep disturbances as a precursor for mental illnesses. In this regard, the impact of sleep disturbance on the development of mental health outcomes including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety has been thoroughly scrutinized. A systematic search was conducted using PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science academic databases using appropriate keywords. Results: Reviewed evidence substantiates the predicting role of sleep complaints and disorders to herald PTSD, depression, and anxiety among military staff. Conclusion: Early diagnosis of sleep disturbances and properly addressing them in active-duty service members and veterans should be then sought to prevent the development and progression of consequent mental health- related comorbidities in this study group.

Objectives: This investigation aimed to compare caffeinated gums with two different dosages of caffeine (200mg vs. 300mg) by assessing their effectiveness on the improvement of cognitive functions among Iranian individuals voluntarily suffering from 30 hours of sleep deprivation. Material and Methods: Thirty-four healthy male volunteers with ages from 28 to 35 years old were randomly assigned to either 200 or 300mg caffeine intake. Each participant completed CANTAB subtests to assess their core cognitive functions including MOT, RTI, RVP, and SWM before and after sleep deprivation, as well as after being treated with caffeinated gum. Results: The 300mg caffeine intake group indicated higher levels of enhancement of core cognitive functions compared with those in the 200mg caffeine intake group. Conclusion: This study suggests that the dose of 300mg of caffeine could effectively enhance the cognitive functions of Iranian individuals suffering from sleep deprivation.

Abstract Cue-induced drug craving and disinhibition are two essential components of continued drug use and relapse in substance use disorders. While these phenomena develop and interact across time, the temporal dynamics of their underlying neural activity remain under-investigated. To explore these dynamics, an analysis of time-varying activation was applied to fMRI data from 62 men with methamphetamine use disorder in their first weeks of recovery in an abstinence-based treatment program. Using a mixed block-event, factorial cue-reactivity/Go-NoGo task and a sliding window across the task duration, dynamically-activated regions were identified in three linear mixed effects models (LMEs). Habituation to drug cues across time was observed in the superior temporal gyri, amygdalae, left hippocampus, and right precuneus, while response inhibition was associated with the sensitization of temporally-dynamic activations across many regions of the inhibitory frontoparietal network. Methamphetamine-related response inhibition was associated with temporally-dynamic activity in the parahippocampal gyri and right precuneus (corrected p-value

Growing evidence indicates that disruptions in the brain’s functional connectivity play an important role in the pathophysiology of ADHD. The present study investigates alterations in resting-state EEG source connectivity and rich-club organization in children with inattentive (ADHDI) and combined (ADHDC) ADHD compared with typically developing children (TD) under the eyes-closed condition. EEG source analysis was performed by eLORETA in different frequency bands. The lagged phase synchronization (LPS) and graph theoretical metrics were then used to examine group differences in the topological properties and rich-club organization of functional networks. Compared with the TD children, the ADHDI children were characterized by a widespread significant decrease in delta and beta LPS, as well as increased theta and alpha LPS in the left frontal and right occipital regions. The ADHDC children displayed significant increases in LPS in the central, temporal and posterior areas. Both ADHD groups showed small-worldness properties with significant increases and decreases in the network degree in the θ and β bands, respectively. Both subtypes also displayed reduced levels of network segregation. Group differences in rich-club distribution were found in the central and posterior areas. Our findings suggest that resting-state EEG source connectivity analysis can better characterize alterations in the rich-club organization of functional brain networks in ADHD patients.

Fusing a low spatial resolution hyperspectral image (HSI) with a high spatial resolution multispectral image (MSI), aiming to produce a super-resolution hyperspectral image, has recently attracted increasing research interest. In this paper, a novel approach based on coupled non-negative tensor decomposition is proposed. The proposed method performs a tucker tensor factorization of a low resolution hyperspectral image and a high resolution multispectral image under the constraint of non-negative tensor decomposition (NTD). The conventional matrix factorization methods essentially lose spatio-spectral structure information when stacking the 3D data structure of a hyperspectral image into a matrix form. Moreover, the spectral, spatial, or their joint structural features have to be imposed from the outside as a constraint to well pose the matrix factorization problem. The proposed method has the advantage of preserving the spatio-spectral structure of hyperspectral images. In this paper, the NTD is directly imposed on the coupled tensors of the HSI and MSI. Hence, the intrinsic spatio-spectral structure of the HSI is represented without loss, and spatial and spectral information can be interdependently exploited. Furthermore, multilinear interactions of different modes of the HSIs can be exactly modeled with the core tensor of the Tucker tensor decomposition. The proposed method is straightforward and easy to implement. Unlike other state-of-the-art approaches, the complexity of the proposed approach is linear with the size of the HSI cube. Experiments on two well-known datasets give promising results when compared with some recent methods from the literature.

The majority of network studies of human brain structural connectivity are based on single-shell diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) data. Recent advances in imaging hardware and software capabilities have made it possible to acquire multishell (b-values) high-quality data required for better characterization of white-matter crossing-fiber microstructures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which brain structural organization and network topology are affected by the choice of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition strategy and parcellation scale. We performed graph-theoretical network analysis using DWI data from 35 Human Connectome Project subjects. Our study compared four single-shell (b = 1000, 3000, 5000, 10,000 s/mm2) and multishell sampling schemes and six parcellation scales (68, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000 nodes) using five graph metrics, including small-worldness, clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, modularity and global efficiency. Rich-club analysis was also performed to explore the rich-club organization of brain structural networks. Our results showed that the parcellation scale and imaging protocol have significant effects on the network attributes, with the parcellation scale having a substantially larger effect. Regardless of the parcellation scale, the brain structural networks exhibited a rich-club organization with similar cortical distributions across the parcellation scales involving at least 400 nodes. Compared to single b-value diffusion acquisitions, the deterministic tractography using multishell diffusion imaging data consisting of shells with b-values higher than 5000 s/mm2 resulted in significantly improved fiber-tracking results at the locations where fiber bundles cross each other. Brain structural networks constructed using the multishell acquisition scheme including high b-values also exhibited significantly shorter characteristic path lengths, higher global efficiency and lower modularity. Our results showed that both parcellation scale and sampling protocol can significantly impact the rich-club organization of brain structural networks. Therefore, caution should be taken concerning the reproducibility of connectivity results with regard to the parcellation scale and sampling scheme.

In this paper, we present a new semi-automatic brain tissue segmentation method based on a hybrid hierarchical approach that combines a brain atlas as a priori information and a least-square support vector machine (LS-SVM). The method consists of three steps. In the first two steps, the skull is removed and the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is extracted. These two steps are performed using the toolbox FMRIB′s automated segmentation tool integrated in the FSL software (FSL-FAST) developed in Oxford Centre for functional MRI of the brain (FMRIB). Then, in the third step, the LS-SVM is used to segment grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM). The training samples for LS-SVM are selected from the registered brain atlas. The voxel intensities and spatial positions are selected as the two feature groups for training and test. SVM as a powerful discriminator is able to handle nonlinear classification problems; however, it cannot provide posterior probability. Thus, we use a sigmoid function to map the SVM output into probabilities. The proposed method is used to segment CSF, GM and WM from the simulated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using Brainweb MRI simulator and real data provided by Internet Brain Segmentation Repository. The semi-automatically segmented brain tissues were evaluated by comparing to the corresponding ground truth. The Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients, sensitivity and specificity were calculated for the quantitative validation of the results. The quantitative results show that the proposed method segments brain tissues accurately with respect to corresponding ground truth.

In this paper, a novel fuzzy scheme for medical X-ray image classification is presented. In this method, each image is partitioned into 25 overlapping subimages and then, we extracted the shape-texture features from shape and directional information of each subimage. In the classification step, we apply a fuzzy membership to each subimage considering the Euclidean distance between feature vector of each subimage and average of feature vectors of training subimages. At last, a hard classification of the test image can be obtained by performing a max operation on the summation of fuzzy memberships. The proposed method is evaluated for image classification on 2655 radiographic images from IRMA dataset with 300 training samples and 2355 test samples. Classification accuracy rates obtained by fuzzy classifier are higher than that of obtained by multilayer perceptron or even SVM classifier.

This paper represents a new region-based active contour model that can be used to segment images with intensity non-uniformity and high-level noise. The main idea of our proposed method is to use Gaussian distributions with different means and variances with incorporation of intensity non-uniformity model for image segmentation. In order to integrate the spatial information between neighboring pixels in our proposed method, we use Markov Random Field. Our experiments on synthetic images and cerebral magnetic resonance images show the advantages of the proposed method over state-of-art methods, i.e. local Gaussian distribution fitting.

Introduction: The abnormal growth of the brain cells leads to a brain tumor, which has the highest mortality rate. Brain tumor segmentation from magnetic resonance images (MRI) separate the abnormal mass of tissue from normal brain tissues. However, manual brain tumor segmentation from MRI is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Therefore, developing an automatic brain tumor segmentation is an important and challenging task from a medical point of view.Methods: This paper presents an active contour-based method for automatic brain tumor segmentation from multimodal MRI. In the first step, the tumor boundary is detected using the symmetry of the brain structures in the two hemispheres of the brain, followed by the kernel-based fuzzy algorithm. Then, in the second step, the active contour is used to segment the brain tumor from multimodal MRI using an initial contour defined based on the detected boundary.Results: The proposed method was evaluated on the BraTS2017 dataset, including high- and low-grade tumors. In comparison with other active contour-based methods, the experimental evaluation using Dice (95.22±0.033), Jaccard (91.10±0.062) sensitivity (94.79±0.059), and specificity (99.70±0.003) showed that the proposed method yielded better performance on tumor segmentation.Conclusion: The proposed automatic tumor segmentation method achieved better segmentation results than other active contour-based methods.