Neuroanatomical Features That Predict Response to Electroconvulsive Therapy Combined With Antipsychotics in Schizophrenia: A Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study Using Radiomics Strategy

Abstract

Objective: Neuroimaging-based brain signatures may be informative in identifying patients with psychosis who will respond to antipsychotics. However, signatures that inform the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) health care professional about the response likelihood remain unclear in psychosis with radiomics strategy. This study investigated whether brain structure-based signature in the prediction of ECT response in a sample of schizophrenia patients using radiomics approach. Methods: This high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging study included 57 patients at baseline. After ECT combined with antipsychotics, 28 and 29 patients were classified as responders and non-responders. Features of gray matter were extracted and compared. The logistic regression model/support vector machine (LRM/SVM) analysis was used to explore the predictive performance. Results: The regularized multivariate LRM accurately discriminated responders from non-responders, with an accuracy of 90.91%. The structural features were further confirmed in the validating data set, resulting in an accuracy of 87.59%. The accuracy of the SVM in the training set was 90.91%, and the accuracy in the validation set was 91.78%. Conclusion: Our results support the possible use of structural brain feature-based radiomics as a potential tool for predicting ECT response in patients with schizophrenia undergoing antipsychotics, paving the way for utilization of markers in psychosis.