Discriminant Spatial Filtering Method (DSFM) for the identification and analysis of abnormal resting state brain activities

•Identification of discriminant regions is vital for feature selection.•Discriminant spatial filtering helps identify abnormal neural activities using fMRI.•Discriminant spatial projection improves separability and classification accuracy.•Disruption of DMN and frequent shifts in attention were observed in ADHD patients.•DSFM classifier achieves a 73.83% classification accuracy over the ADHD200 dataset.