Identifying Methamphetamine Dependence Using Regional Homogeneity in BOLD Signals

Methamphetamine is a highly addictive drug of abuse, which will cause a series of abnormal consequences mentally and physically. This paper is aimed at studying whether the abnormalities of regional homogeneity (ReHo) could be effective features to distinguish individuals with methamphetamine dependence (MAD) from control subjects using machine-learning methods. We made use of resting-state fMRI to measure the regional homogeneity of 41 individuals with MAD and 42 age- and sex-matched control subjects and found that compared with control subjects, individuals with MAD have lower ReHo values in the right medial superior frontal gyrus but higher ReHo values in the right temporal inferior fusiform. In addition, AdaBoost classifier, a pretty effective ensemble learning of machine learning, was employed to classify individuals with MAD from control subjects with abnormal ReHo values. By utilizing the leave-one-out cross-validation method, we got the accuracy more than 84.3%, which means we can almost distinguish individuals with MAD from the control subjects in ReHo values via machine-learning approaches. In a word, our research results suggested that the AdaBoost classifier-neuroimaging approach may be a promising way to find whether a person has been addicted to methamphetamine, and also, this paper shows that resting-state fMRI should be considered as a biomarker, a noninvasive and effective assistant tool for evaluating MAD.