Multiple measurement analysis of resting-state fMRI for ADHD classification in adolescent brain from the ABCD study

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in school-aged children. Its accurate diagnosis looks after patients’ interests well with effective treatment, which is important to them and their family. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) has been widely used to characterize the abnormal brain function by computing the voxel-wise measures and Pearson’s correlation (PC)-based functional connectivity (FC) for ADHD diagnosis. However, exploring the powerful measures of rsfMRI to improve ADHD diagnosis remains a particular challenge. To this end, this paper proposes an automated ADHD classification framework by fusion of multiple measures of rsfMRI in adolescent brain. First, we extract the voxel-wise measures and ROI-wise time series from the brain regions of rsfMRI after preprocessing. Then, to extract the multiple functional connectivities, we compute the PC-derived FCs including the topographical information-based high-order FC (tHOFC) and dynamics-based high-order FC (dHOFC), the sparse representation (SR)-derived FCs including the group SR (GSR), the strength and similarity guided GSR (SSGSR), and sparse low-rank (SLR). Finally, these measures are combined with multiple kernel learning (MKL) model for ADHD classification. The proposed method is applied to the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset. The results show that the FCs of dHOFC and SLR perform better than the others. Fusing multiple measures achieves the best classification performance (AUC = 0.740, accuracy = 0.6916), superior to those from the single measure and the previous studies. We have identified the most discriminative FCs and brain regions for ADHD diagnosis, which are consistent with those of published literature.