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Background:The lack of analysis of brain networks in individuals with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is an obstacle to detecting and preventing neurological complications of ESRD. Purpose: This study aims to explore the correlation between brain activity and ESRD based on a quantitative analysis of the dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) of brain networks. It provides insights into differences in brain functional connectivity between healthy individuals and ESRD patients and aims to identify the brain activities and regions most relevant to ESRD. Methods: Differences in brain functional connectivity between healthy individuals and ESRD patients were analyzed and quantitatively evaluated in this study. Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals obtained through resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) were used as information carriers. First, a connectivity matrix of dFC was constructed for each subject using Pearson correlation. Then a high-order connectivity matrix was built by applying the "correlation's correlation" method. Second, sparsification of the high-order connectivity matrix was performed using the graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (gLASSO) model. The discriminative features of the sparse connectivity matrix were extracted and sifted using central moments and t-tests, respectively. Finally, feature classification was conducted using a support vector machine (SVM). Results: The experiment showed that functional connectivity was reduced to some degree in certain brain regions of ESRD patients. The sensorimotor, visual, and cerebellum subnetworks had the highest numbers of abnormal functional connectivities. It is inferred that these three subnetworks most likely have a direct relationship to ESRD. Conclusions: The low-order and high-order dFC features can identify the positions where brain damage occurs in ESRD patients. In contrast to healthy individuals, the damaged brain regions and the disruption of functional connectivity in ESRD patients were not limited to specific regions. This indicates that ESRD has a severe impact on brain function. Abnormal functional connectivity was mainly associated with the three functional brain regions responsible for visual processing, emotional, and motor control. The findings presented here have the potential for use in the detection, prevention, and prognostic evaluation of ESRD.Peirui Bai and Yulong Wang share co-first authorship and contributed equally to this study.

Neuropsychiatric disorders seriously affect the health of patients, and early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to improve the quality of patients’ life. Machine learning and other related methods can be used for disease diagnosis and prediction, among which multi-classifier fusion method has been widely studied due to its significant performance over single classifiers. In this paper, we propose a multi-classifier fusion classification framework based on belief-valuefor the neuropsychiatric disorders diagnosis. Specifically, the belief-value measures the belief level of different samples by considering information from two perspectives, which are distance information (the output distance of the classifier) and local density information (the weight of the nearest neighbor samples on the test samples). The proposed belief-value is more representative compared to the belief-value which only uses a single type of information. Further, based on the concept of multi-view learning, we performed the calculation of the belief-values under the sample space with different features, and the complementary relationship between different belief-values was captured by a multilayer perceptual (MLP) network. Compared with majority voting and linear fusion methods, the MLP network can better capture the nonlinear relationship between belief-values, which produces better diagnostic results. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms single classifier and multi-classifier linear fusion methods for the diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders.

BackgroundThe abnormal brain functional connectivity (FC) of patients with mental diseases is closely linked to the transition features among brain states. However, the current research on state transition will produce certain division deviations in the measurement method of state division, and also ignore the transition features among multiple states that contain more abundant information for analyzing brain diseases.PurposeTo investigate the potential of the proposed method based on coarse‐grained similarity measurement to solve the problem of state division, and consider the transition features among multiple states to analyze the FC abnormalities of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients.MethodsWe used resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine 45 ASD and 47 healthy controls (HC). The FC between brain regions was calculated by the sliding window and correlation algorithm, and a novel coarse‐grained similarity measure method was used to cluster the FC networks into five states, and then extract the features both of the state itself and the transition features among multiple states for analysis and diagnosis.Results(1) The state as divided by the coarse‐grained measurement method improves the diagnostic performance of individuals with ASD compared with previous methods. (2) The transition features among multiple states can provide complementary information to the features of the state itself in the ASD analysis and diagnosis. (3) ASD individuals have different brain state transitions than HC. Specifically, the abnormalities in intra‐ and inter‐network connectivity of ASD patients mainly occur in the default mode network, the visual network, and the cerebellum.ConclusionsSuch results demonstrate that our approach with new measurements and new features is effective and promising in brain state analysis and ASD diagnosis.