Brain functional connectivity based on phase lag index of electroencephalography for automated diagnosis of schizophrenia using residual neural networks

The complexity of symptoms of schizophrenia (SZ) complicate traditional and effective diagnoses based on clinical signs. Moreover, clinical diagnosis of SZ is manual, time‐consuming, and error‐prone. Thus, there is a requirement to develop automated systems for timely and accurate diagnosis of SZ. This paper proposes an automated SZ diagnosis pipeline based on residual neural networks (ResNet). To exploit the superior image processing capabilities of the ResNet models, multi‐channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were converted into functional connectivity representations (FCRs). The functional connectivity of multiple regions in the cerebral cortex is critical for a better understanding of the mechanisms of SZ. In creating the FCR input images, the phase lag index (PLI) was calculated based on 16‐channel EEG signals from 45 SZ patients and 39 healthy control (HC) subjects to reduce and avoid the volume conduction effect. The experimental results showed that satisfactory classification performance (accuracy = 96.02%, specificity = 94.85%, sensitivity = 97.03%, precision = 95.70%, and F1‐score = 96.33%) was achieved by combining FCR inputs of beta oscillatory and the ResNet‐50 model. The statistical analyses also confirmed that there is a significant difference between SZ patients and HC subjects (p < 0.001, one‐way ANOVA). More specifically, the average connectivity strengths between nodes in the parietal cortex and those in the central, occipital, and temporal regions were significantly reduced in SZ patients compared to HC subjects. Overall results demonstrated that this paper not only provided an automated diagnostic model whose classification performance is superior to most previous studies but also valuable biomarkers for clinical use.