Discriminating schizophrenia using recurrent neural network applied on time courses of multi-site FMRI data

BACKGROUND: Current fMRI-based classification approaches mostly use functional connectivity or spatial maps as input, instead of exploring the dynamic time courses directly, which does not leverage the full temporal information. METHODS: Motivated by the ability of recurrent neural networks (RNN) in capturing dynamic information of time sequences, we propose a multi-scale RNN model, which enables classification between 558 schizophrenia and 542 healthy controls by using time courses of fMRI independent components (ICs) directly. To increase interpretability, we also propose a leave-one-IC-out looping strategy for estimating the top contributing ICs. FINDINGS: Accuracies of 83·2% and 80·2% were obtained respectively for the multi-site pooling and leave-one-site-out transfer classification. Subsequently, dorsal striatum and cerebellum components contribute the top two group-discriminative time courses, which is true even when adopting different brain atlases to extract time series. INTERPRETATION: This is the first attempt to apply a multi-scale RNN model directly on fMRI time courses for classification of mental disorders, and shows the potential for multi-scale RNN-based neuroimaging classifications. FUND: Natural Science Foundation of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Institutes of Health Grants, National Science Foundation.