Brain subtyping enhances the neuroanatomical discrimination of schizophrenia

Abstract

Identifying distinctive subtypes of schizophrenia could ultimately enhance diagnostic and prognostic accuracy. We aimed to uncover neuroanatomical subtypes of chronic schizophrenia patients to test whether stratification can enhance computer-aided discrimination of patients from control subjects. Unsupervised, data-driven clustering of structural MRI (sMRI) data was used to identify 2 subtypes of schizophrenia patients drawn from a US-based open science repository (n = 71) and we quantified classification improvements compared to controls (n = 74) using supervised machine learning. We externally validated the unsupervised and supervised learning models in a heterogeneous German validation sa..