A comparative analysis of functional connectivity data in resting and task-related conditions of the brain for disease signature of OCD

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a frequent, chronic disorder producing intrusive thoughts which results in repetitive behaviors. It is thought that this psychological disorder occurs due to abnormal functional connectivity in certain regions of the brain called Default Mode Network (DMN) mainly. Recently, functional MRI (FMRI) studies were performed in order to compare the differences in brain activity between patients with OCD and healthy individuals through different conditions of the brain. Our previous study on extraction of disease signature for OCD that is determining the features for discrimination of OCD patients from healthy individuals based on their resting-sate functional connectivity (rs-FC) data had given encouraging results. In the present study, functional data extracted from FMRI images of subjects under imagination task (maintaining an image in mind, im-FC) is considered. The aim of this study is to compare classification results achieved from both resting and task-related (imagination) conditions. This research has shown quite interesting and promising results using the same classification (SVM) method.