Discriminating Pathological and Non-pathological Internet Gamers Using Sparse Neuroanatomical Features

Internet gaming disorder (IGD) is often diagnosed on the basis of nine underlying criteria from the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Here, we examined whether such symptom-based categorization could be translated into computation-based classification. Structural MRI (sMRI) and diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) data were acquired in 38 gamers diagnosed with IGD, 68 normal gamers diagnosed as not having IGD, and 37 healthy non-gamers. We generated 108 features of gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) structure from the MRI data. When regularized logistic regression was applied to the 108 neuroanatomical features to select important ones for the distinction between the groups, the disordered and normal gamers were represented in terms of 43 and 21 features, respectively, in relation to the healthy non-gamers, whereas the disordered gamers were represented in terms of 11 features in relation to the normal gamers. In support vector machines (SVM) using the sparse neuroanatomical features as predictors, the disordered and normal gamers were discriminated successfully, with accuracy exceeding 98%, from the healthy non-gamers, but the classification between the disordered and normal gamers was relatively challenging. These findings suggest that pathological and non-pathological gamers as categorized with the criteria from the DSM-5 could be represented by sparse neuroanatomical features, especially in the context of discriminating those from non-gaming healthy individuals.