In this study, grey matter abnormalities in the spatial-scale domain for a large sample of patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP), individuals’ clinical high risk (CHR) and healthy controls (HC) were investigated. We applied a combination of established methodologies using Largest-Lyapunov-Exponent and wavelet transformation to identify psychosis and CHR. The main advantage of the method is that it requires only 1% of the voxels in GM images for identification; in terms of low-complexity analysis, 5,000 voxels close to the surface of the GM centroid were sufficient for robust recognition of FEP and CHR.
We considered the nonlinear dynamics of the most weighted voxels by intensity and distance. Two outcome measures were used in this analysis: a) the lambda value and b) the scalograms. Lambda as an outcome measure successfully differentiated FEP and CHR patients from HC but was not sufficient to distinguish FEP from CHR. Multiple findings indicate similar brain abnormalities between CHR and FEP [2, 17-19]. Through localization of the top selected voxels and multiple comparisons of the lambda across brain regions and groups, statistically significant differences were revealed in the occipital and temporal lobe and could serve as biomarkers of psychotic disorders. Many studies present the involvement of the occipital lobe in FEP and CHR [20-22]: Subjects with predominant attenuated psychotic symptoms are characterized by a reduction of GM-intensity values in the occipital cortex [22]. In previous studies in at-risk individuals progressive gray matter reductions in temporal regions were reported [23-25].
Our second outcome measure, scalograms of brain sMRI, were able to identify early-stage psychosis from CHR. Both FEP and CHR subjects could be differentiated from HC by simple visual inspection of the scalograms of the lambda extracted from the top 5,000 voxels. FEP scalograms were significantly different from those of HC and CHR; no differences were observed between CHR and HC. Thus, the move from the spatial domain into the frequency domain revealed hidden patterns in the mechanism of the progression of the disease. Two frequencies in the spatial-series of lambda provided the ability to statistically differentiate FEP from CHR, which was not possible using solely the lambda value. The small value of the frequencies presented by high scales was interpreted as sharp changes in the brain topology of FEP compared to CHR. We observed that the nonlinear dynamic of the weighted distances as an expression of the structure relief of the individual brains is highly informative for the identification of FEP and CHR subjects.
The innovation of the proposed method in the field of psychosis biomarker research is that it uses spatial-series extracted from sMRI, which separates it from other approaches that investigate grey matter volume increase or decrease, such as VBM analysis. Instead, our approach transforms the brain sMRI into a spatial-series, calculates the chaotic grey matter distribution using the lambda value, and finally transforms the lambda series into a two-dimensional (2D) scalogram by using the Wavelet Transform (WT), in order to have a useful representation of spatial-scale features.
The main advantage of the method is that the impact of the initial point of reference, the GM centroid in individual GM images, that was used for the calculation of the distance to voxels, is not reflected in the lambda value. Lambda measures how the distances diverge in the state-space, regarding the distances across all voxels selected, and thus is a ‘path-free’ measurement. As lambda expresses the way that two neighbor voxels, in the state-space, diverge across the GM topology with respect to all the other voxels, it depicts the way that voxels from different regions are related to structural changes in psychosis. As the scales represent the structure relief, it may reflect volume increase patterns in FEP patients compared to CHR subjects. However, our results should be considered in view of certain limitations: The sample size was moderate; moreover, the method contains many parameter selections that warrant further exploration (e.g., the number of the selected voxels). We plan to address these limitations in further studies investigating the effectiveness and robustness of the method in larger datasets with different scanning parameters, and across different (including non-psychotic) diagnoses.