A granular functional network classifier for brain diseases analysis

ABSTRACT

The development of interpretable and readable diagnosis support models in the medical field is becoming an active research area. Neuroimaging technology has been widely used in the study of various brain diseases, supported by several kind of machine learning algorithms. Such algorithms, in spite of their accuracy, have often a lack of interpretability. In order to address these issues, in this paper, a new classifier based on functional networks, revised from a granular perspective is proposed. Granular architectures allow high accuracy, without losing interpretability. Two classes of neurodevelopmental disorders, that is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder, will be considered to perform numerical experiments on publicly available data. The numerical results against state-of-the-art methods show the good performance of the proposed scheme, by confirming some theoretical achievements.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical big data
• machine learning
• patient classification
• fuzzy sets
• ADHD
• ASD

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professors C.M.A. Pinto, I. Domingues, A. Rocha, A. Sequeira, for their kind invitation to submit a manuscript for the special research issue on Multimedia Systems and Applications in Biomedicine. The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their time and the valuable suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefania Tomasiello

Stefania Tomasiello, Ph.D. in computer science (University of Salerno, Italy). Permanent researcher with CO.RI.SA. (Research Consortium on Agent Systems), University of Salerno, Italy (on leave). Senior Research Fellow in the Dept. of Management and Innovation Systems, University of Salerno. National scientific qualification as associate professor in computer science and numerical analysis. Workpackage leader in several funded projects and expert evaluator (ex-ante and ex-post) of applied research projects for the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and, formerly, the Italian Ministry of University and Research. Adjunct professor of Fundamentals of Computer Science, and formerly, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Methods and Finite Element Analysis in the University of Basilicata, Italy. TPC member in many international conferences, here included ACM and IEEE sponsored events. Her research interests lie in scientific and soft computing, fuzzy mathematics, nonlinear dynamics. She authored and co-authored numerous papers in the above mentioned areas. She is managing editor of Evolutionary Intelligence (Springer), associate editor of International Journal of Computer Mathematics (Taylor&Francis), editorial board member of some journals. ACM, ECMI, EUSFLAT and IEEE member.