Impact of ageing on the brain regions of the schizophrenia patients: an fMRI study using evolutionary approach
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Impact of ageing on the brain regions of the schizophrenia patients: an fMRI study using evolutionary approach Indranath Chatterjee1 Naveen Kumar4
· Virendra Kumar2 · Bharti Rana3 · Manoj Agarwal3 ·
Received: 14 March 2019 / Revised: 9 April 2020 / Accepted: 4 June 2020 / © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that results in adverse functional and biochemical changes in the brain. Although normal ageing significantly affects the brain of a person structurally as well as functionally, the functional activation pattern in the brain of a schizophrenia patient may change differentially with age. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first of its kind fMRI-based study to find the functional changes in the brain of schizophrenia patients associated with ageing. In this study, we aim to compare the agerelated variations in the functional activation pattern in the brain of schizophrenia patients vis a vis the healthy controls. For this study, we have used 1.5T fMRI data of 60 subjects and 3T fMRI data of 50 subjects, having an equal number of schizophrenia and healthy subjects. We have split this dataset into multiple age-groups. We applied a three-stage methodology comprising the application of the general linear model, followed by statistical hypothesis testing, and a finally bi-objective NSGA-II algorithm for selection of relevant voxels. The proposed methodology yielded a set of relevant voxels in the brain that demonstrate the age related variations in activation patterns. Specifically, it revealed increased functional activations in elderly patients suffering from schizophrenia in multiple brain regions, mostly located in areas like frontal lobe, temporal lobe and parietal lobe as compared to the young schizophrenic patients. These findings may help in making decisions for differential clinical management of younger patients as compared to the elderly ones. Keywords Schizophrenia · Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) · Ageing · Feature selection · Classification · Evolutionary algorithm
1 Introduction Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects the normal thinking, emotions and actions of a person [7, 8]. Although some patients have the onset of the first episode of Indranath Chatterjee
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the psychosis at a later age (above 40 to 45 years) [12, 16, 21], it often strikes the young adults (20 to 35 years), and sometimes, even adolescents (10 to 19 years) [26, 47, 52]. It is well known that schizophrenia as well as the normal ageing process induces structural and functional changes in the brain [9, 11, 28, 41]. In a study [41], Peters reported decrease in brain volume, particularly in the frontal cortex, due to normal ageing. He observed that the volume of the brain and/or its weight declines with age at a rate of around 5% per decade after the age of 40, and this rate of decline possi
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