Identifying individuals with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder based on multisite resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging: A radiomics analysis

Attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders, characterized by symptoms of age‐inappropriate inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Apart from behavioral symptoms investigated by psychiatric methods, there is no standard biological test to diagnose ADHD. This study aimed to explore whether the radiomics features based on resting‐state functional magnetic resonance (rs‐fMRI) have more discriminative power for the diagnosis of ADHD. The rs‐fMRI of 187 subjects with ADHD and 187 healthy controls were collected from 5 sites of ADHD‐200 Consortium. A total of four preprocessed rs‐fMRI images including regional homogeneity (ReHo), amplitude of low‐frequency fluctuation (ALFF), voxel‐mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) and network degree centrality (DC) were used in this study. From each of the four images, we extracted 93 radiomics features within each of 116 automated anatomical labeling brain areas, resulting in a total of 43,152 features for each subject. After dimension reduction and feature selection, 19 radiomics features were retained (5 from ALFF, 9 from ReHo, 3 from VMHC and 2 from DC). By training and optimizing a support vector machine model using the retained features of training dataset, we achieved the accuracy of 76.3% and 77.0% (areas under curve = 0.811 and 0.797) in the training and testing datasets, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that radiomics can be a novel strategy for fully utilizing rs‐fMRI information to distinguish ADHD from healthy controls. The rs‐fMRI‐based radiomics features have the potential to be neuroimaging biomarkers for ADHD.