Cortical thickness distinguishes between major depression and schizophrenia in adolescents

BACKGROUND: Early diagnosis of adolescent psychiatric disorder is crucial for early intervention. However, there is extensive comorbidity between affective and psychotic disorders, which increases the difficulty of precise diagnoses among adolescents. METHODS: We obtained structural magnetic resonance imaging scans from 150 adolescents, including 67 and 47 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and schizophrenia (SCZ), as well as 34 healthy controls (HC) to explore whether psychiatric disorders could be identified using a machine learning technique. Specifically, we used the support vector machine and the leave-one-out cross-validation method to distinguish among adolescents with MDD and SCZ and healthy controls. RESULTS: We found that cortical thickness was a classification feature of a) MDD and HC with 79.21% accuracy where the temporal pole had the highest weight; b) SCZ and HC with 69.88% accuracy where the left superior temporal sulcus had the highest weight. Notably, adolescents with MDD and SCZ could be classified with 62.93% accuracy where the right pars triangularis had the highest weight. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that cortical thickness may be a critical biological feature in the diagnosis of adolescent psychiatric disorders. These findings might be helpful to establish an early prediction model for adolescents to better diagnose psychiatric disorders. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12888-021-03373-1.