Altered modular organization in schizophrenia patients and analysis using supervised association rule mining

Complex neuro-degenerative disorders affect the intrinsic topological architecture of brain connectivity. There are very few studies concentrating on the occurrence of modular changes in the structural and functional connectome of people diagnosed with Schizophrenia. In this study, group averaged analysis on modular organization of 15 healthy and 12 Schizophrenic subjects were performed to understand the topological alterations occurring in brain networks of diseased against normal. The major contributing regions for changes in optimal brain architecture were also identified. It also involves the investigation of individual subject's functional connectivity and the attempts were made to extract the modular specific roles of brain regions through supervised association rule mining. On comparison with group average measurements, it was found to produce similar results and it was understood that inter and intra-module connections evidently varied in Schizophrenia because of alterations in extremely organized modular architecture. This is believed to provide new insights in understanding the complex neuro-degenerative disorder through analysis on modular organization of functional brain networks. Highly influential regions were also determined. These regions were found to be potential biomarkers for Schizophrenia diagnosis.