An Efficient Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Diagnostic Technique Based on Multi-Regional Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging

In this paper, an efficient technique for the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was proposed. The proposed method used features/voxels extracted from structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of seven brain regions and efficiently classified three subtypes of ADHD: ADHD-C, ADHD-H, and ADHD-I, as well as the typically developing control (TDC). Training and testing data for experiments were obtained from ADHD-200 database, and 41,721 features/voxels were extracted from sMRI by using region-of-interest (ROI). The proposed ADHD diagnostic technique built an efficient ADHD classifier in two steps. In the first step, a proposed regional voxels selection method (rVSM) selected an optimal set of features/voxels from seven brain regions available in ADHD-200, i.e., the Amygdala, Caudate, Cerebellar Vermis, Corpus Callosum, Hippocampus, Striatum, and Thalamus. In the second step, voxels/features selected by rVSM were used together to form a unified set of voxels. The unified set of voxels was used by a multi-region voxels selection method to train an efficient classifier using the extreme learning machine (ELM). Finally, the proposed method selected a unique set of voxels from the seven brain regions and built a final ELM classifier with maximum accuracy. Experiments clearly indicated that the proposed method produced better results than existing methods.