Differentiating Boys with ADHD from Those with Typical Development Based on Whole-Brain Functional Connections Using a Machine Learning Approach

Yunkai Sun,1,2,* Lei Zhao,1,2,* Zhihui Lan,1,2 Xi-Ze Jia,1,2 Shao-Wei Xue1,2 1Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Institute of Psychological Sciences and the Affiliated Hospital, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 311121, People’s Republic of China; 2Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Research in Assessment of Cognitive Impairments, Hangzhou 311121, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Shao-Wei XueCenter for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Hangzhou Normal University, No. 2318, Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 311121, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +86-571-28867717Email xuedrm@126.comPurpose: In recent years, machine learning techniques have received increasing attention as a promising approach to differentiating patients from healthy subjects. Therefore, some resting-state functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging (R-fMRI) studies have used interregional functional connections as discriminative features. The aim of this study was to investigate ADHD-related spatially distributed discriminative features derived from whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity patterns using machine learning.Patients and Methods: We measured the interregional functional connections of the R-fMRI data from 40 ADHD patients and 28 matched typically developing controls. Machine learning was used to discriminate ADHD patients from controls. Classification performance was assessed by permutation tests.Results: The results from the model with the highest classification accuracy showed that 85.3% of participants were correctly identified using leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOV) with support vector machine (SVM). The majority of the most discriminative functional connections were located within or between the cerebellum, default mode network (DMN) and frontoparietal regions. Approximately half of the most discriminative connections were associated with the cerebellum. The cerebellum, right superi