Prediction of psychosis using neural oscillations and machine learning in neuroleptic-naïve at-risk patients

Abstract

Objectives: This study investigates whether abnormal neural oscillations, which have been shown to precede the onset of frank psychosis, could be used towards the individualised prediction of psychosis in clinical high-risk patients. Methods: We assessed the individualised prediction of psychosis by detecting specific patterns of beta and gamma oscillations using machine-learning algorithms. Prediction models were trained and tested on 53 neuroleptic-naïve patients with a clinical high-risk for psychosis. Of these, 18 later transitioned to psychosis. All patients were followed up for at least 3 years. For an honest estimation of the generalisation capacity, the predictive performance of the models was assessed in unseen test cases using repeated nested cross-validation. Results: Transition to psychosis could be predicted from current-source density (CSD; area under the curve [AUC] = 0.77), but not from lagged phase synchronicity data (LPS; AUC = 0.56). Combining both modalities did not improve the predictive accuracy (AUC = 0.78). The left superior temporal gyrus, the left inferior parietal lobule and the precuneus most strongly contributed to the prediction of psychosis. Conclusions: Our results suggest that CSD measurements extracted from clinical resting state EEG can help to improve the prediction of psychosis on a single-subject level.

Key words:

• Schizophrenia
• psychosis
• machine learning
• EEG
• current source density

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (P0BSP1-152074, 3200-057216.99, 3200-0572216.99, PBBSB-106936, 3232BO-119382). The authors would like to thank the patients and volunteers for participating in this study.

Statement of interest

None to declare.