First-episode schizofrenia classification with the use of MRI brain image deformations

Deformation-based morphometry (DBM) has been used to uncover structural inter-group differences in MRI-based neuropsychiatric studies recently. We use 3-D deformation fields resulting from cross-subject registrations to construct classifiers which are able to recognize first-episode schizophrenia patients from healthy controls. The k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and the Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification methods are compared in terms of their sensitivity, specificity and overall accuracy.