Computer aided diagnosis of schizophrenia on resting state fMRI data by ensembles of ELM

Resting state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) is increasingly used for the identification of image biomarkers of brain diseases or psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia. This paper deals with the application of ensembles of Extreme Learning Machines (ELM) to build Computer Aided Diagnosis systems on the basis of features extracted from the activity measures computed over rs-fMRI data. The power of ELM to provide quick but near optimal solutions to the training of Single Layer Feedforward Networks (SLFN) allows extensive exploration of discriminative power of feature spaces in affordable time with off-the-shelf computational resources. Exploration is performed in this paper by an evolutionary search approach that has found functional activity map features allowing to achieve quite successful classification experiments, providing biologically plausible voxel-site localizations. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.