Identification of changes in grey matter volume using an evolutionary approach: an MRI study of schizophrenia

Schizophrenia, a serious psychological disorder, causes auditory and visual hallucinations, and delusions in a person. Several studies have shown that schizophrenia imposes structural changes in human brain. Relative changes in the grey matter volume of the schizophrenia patients in comparison to healthy controls have been well explored. However, identification of relevant brain regions that exhibit grey matter atrophy and also aid in the classification of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls has not been extensively investigated. In this study, a novel application of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm has been developed to select a set of relevant features (voxels) that show grey matter changes in the brain regions attributable to schizophrenia. This study uses MRI data of 32 healthy controls and 28 schizophrenia patients. The results show notable shrink in the gray matter volume in the brain of the schizophrenia patients, mostly in inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, and insula. The proposed approach yields a mean classification accuracy close to 90% with a feature set having around 70 voxels. This study may open a means of investigation of underlying neurobiology of schizophrenic brain for effective clinical intervention.