Identification of patterns of gray matter abnormalities in schizophrenia using source-based morphometry and bagging

Despite its reliable diagnosis, schizophrenia lacks an objective diagnostic test or a validated biomarker, which prevents a better understanding of this disorder. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) has been vastly explored to find consistent abnormality patterns of gray matter concentration (GMC) in schizophrenia, yet we are far from having reached conclusive evidence. This paper presents a machine learning approach based on resampling techniques to find brain regions with consistent patterns of GMC differences between healthy controls and schizophrenia patients, these regions being detected by means of source-based morphometry. This work uses multi-site data from the Mind Clinical Imaging Consortium, which is composed of sMRI data from 124 controls and 110 patients. Our method achieves a better classification rate than other algorithms and detects regions with GMC differences between both groups that are consistent with several findings on the literature. In addition, the results obtained on data from multiple sites suggest that it may be possible to replicate these results on other datasets.