School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Division of Psychology, School of Applied Sciences, London Southbank University, London, UK.
Int J Neural Syst. 2022 Apr;32(4):2250013. doi: 10.1142/S0129065722500137. Epub 2022 Mar 2.
Schizotypy is a latent cluster of personality traits that denote a vulnerability for schizophrenia or a type of spectrum disorder. The aim of the study is to investigate parametric effective brain connectivity features for classifying high versus low schizotypy (LS) status. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are recorded from 13 high schizotypy (HS) and 11 LS participants during an emotional auditory odd-ball task. The brain connectivity signals for machine learning are taken after the settlement of event-related potentials. A multivariate autoregressive (MVAR)-based connectivity measure is estimated from the EEG signals using the directed transfer functions (DTFs) method. The values of DTF power in five standard frequency bands are used as features. The support vector machines (SVMs) revealed significant differences between HS and LS. The accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of the results using SVM are as high as 89.21%, 90.3%, and 88.2%, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the effective brain connectivity in prefrontal/parietal and prefrontal/frontal brain regions considerably changes according to schizotypal status. These findings prove that the brain connectivity indices offer valuable biomarkers for detecting schizotypal personality. Further monitoring of the changes in DTF following the diagnosis of schizotypy may lead to the early identification of schizophrenia and other spectrum disorders.
精神分裂症倾向是一种潜在的人格特质集群，预示着患精神分裂症或某种谱系障碍的易感性。本研究旨在探究用于区分高精神分裂症倾向（HS）与低精神分裂症倾向（LS）状态的参数有效大脑连接特征。在一项情绪听觉Oddball 任务中，从 13 名高精神分裂症倾向（HS）和 11 名低精神分裂症倾向（LS）参与者记录脑电图（EEG）信号。在事件相关电位解决后，从 EEG 信号中采用多元自回归（MVAR）连接度量来估计定向传递函数（DTF）。将五个标准频带中的 DTF 功率值用作特征。支持向量机（SVM）揭示了 HS 和 LS 之间的显著差异。SVM 结果的准确性、特异性和敏感性分别高达 89.21%、90.3%和 88.2%。我们的研究结果表明，根据精神分裂症倾向，前额叶/顶叶和前额叶/额叶大脑区域的有效大脑连接发生了相当大的变化。这些发现证明了大脑连接指数为检测精神分裂症人格提供了有价值的生物标志物。进一步监测 DTF 在精神分裂症倾向诊断后的变化可能会导致对精神分裂症和其他谱系障碍的早期识别。
