Single-modal neuroimaging computer aided diagnosis for schizophrenia based on ensemble learning using privileged information

Neuroimaging technologies have been applied to the diagnosis of schizophrenia. In order to improve the performance of the single-modal neuroimaging-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for schizophrenia, an ensemble learning algorithm based on learning using privileged information (LUPI) was proposed in this work. Specifically, the extreme learning machine based auto-encoder (ELM-AE) was first adopted to learn new feature representation for the single-modal neuroimaging data. Random project algorithm was then performed on the learned high-dimensional features to generate several new feature subspaces. After that, multiple feature pairs were built among these subspaces to work as source domain and target domain, respectively, which were used to train multiple support vector machine plus (SVM+) classifier. Finally, a strong classifier is learned by combining these SVM+ classifiers for classification. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a public schizophrenia neuroimaging dataset, including the data of structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and functional MRI (fMRI). The results showed that the proposed algorithm achieved the best diagnosis performance. In particular, the classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the proposed algorithm were 72.12% ± 8.20%, 73.50% ± 15.44% and 70.93% ± 12.93%, respectively, on the sMRI data, and it also achieved the classification accuracy of 72.33% ± 8.95%, sensitivity of 68.50% ± 16.58% and specificity of 75.73% ± 16.10% on the fMRI data. The proposed algorithm overcomes the problem that the traditional LUPI methods need the additional privileged information modality as source domain. It can be directly applied to the single-modal data for classification, and also can improve the classification performance. Therefore, it suggests that the proposed algorithm will have wider applications.