Schizophrenia is a complex psychiatric disorder that has eluded a characterization in terms of local abnormalities of brain activity, and is hypothesized to affect the collective, ``emergent working of the brain. We propose a novel data-driven approach to capture emergent features using functional brain networks [Eguiluzet al] extracted from fMRI data, and demonstrate its advantage over traditional region-of-interest (ROI) and local, task-specific linear activation analyzes. Our results suggest that schizophrenia is indeed associated with disruption of global, emergent brain properties related to its functioning as a network, which cannot be explained by alteration of local activation patterns. Moreover, further exploitation of interactions by sparse Markov Random Field classifiers shows clear gain over linear methods, such as Gaussian Naive Bayes and SVM, allowing to reach 86% accuracy (over 50% baseline - random guess), which is quite remarkable given that it is based on a single fMRI experiment using a simple auditory task.

We describe here a classification system based on automatically identified cortical sulci. Multivariate recognition methods are required for the detection of complex brain patterns with a spatial distribution. However, such methods may face the well-known issue of the curse of dimensionality-the risk of overfitting the training dataset in high-dimensional space. We overcame this problem, using a classifier pipeline with one- or two-stage of descriptor selection based on machine-learning methods, followed by a support vector machine classifier or linear discriminant analysis. We compared alternative designs of the pipeline on two different datasets built from the same database corresponding to 151 brains. The first dataset dealt with cortex asymmetry and the second dealt with the effect of the subject's sex. Our system successfully (98%) distinguished between the left and right hemispheres on the basis of sulcal shape (size, depth, etc.). The sex of the subject could be determined with a success rate of 85%. These results highlight the attractiveness of multivariate recognition models combined with appropriate descriptor selection. The sulci selected by the pipeline are consistent with previous whole-brain studies on sex effects and hemispheric asymmetries.