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Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a tool to assist the diagnosis of major psychiatric disorders in a Chinese population

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European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Advances in neuroimaging have promised the development of specific and objective biomarkers for the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders. Recently, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been used during cognitive tasks to measure cortical dysfunction associated with mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia (SCH), Major-Depressive disorder (MD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD). We investigated the ability of fNIRS as a clinically viable tool to successfully distinguish healthy individuals from those with major psychiatric disorders. 316 patients with major psychiatric disorders (198 SCH/54 MD/64 BP) and 101 healthy controls were included in this study. Changes in oxygenated-hemoglobin during a Chinese language verbal fluency test were measured using a 52-channel fNIRS machine over the bilateral temporal and frontal lobe areas. We evaluated the ability of two task-evoked features selected from prior studies the Integral and Centroid values, to identify individuals with major diagnoses. Both the integral value of frontal and centroid value of temporal showed sensitivity in classifying individuals with mental disorders from healthy controls. However, using a combined index featuring both the integral value and centroid value to differentiate psychiatric disorders from healthy controls with an AUC of 0.913, differentiate individuals with mood disorders from healthy controls showed an AUC of 0.899, while for schizophrenia the AUC was 0.737. Our data suggest that fNIRS can be used as a candidate biomarker during differential diagnosis individuals with mood or psychosis disorders and offer a step towards individualization of treatment.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFC1306800), Nature Science Foundation of Shanghai (19ZR1445100), Shanghai Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission Research Project (20174Y0013), Shanghai Mental Health Center Foundation (2016-FX-01, 2017-TSXK-03), the National Nature Science Foundation of China (81671332, 81671329, 81901832, 81971251).

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Author notes

  1. Yan-Yan Wei and Qi Chen contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, 600 Wanping Nan Road, Shanghai, 200030, People’s Republic of China

    YanYan Wei, Xiaochen Tang, YingYing Tang, LiHua Xu & ZhenYing Qian

  2. The 102nd Hospital of the Liberation of Army, Changzhou, 213003, People’s Republic of China

    Qi Chen & Li Tu

  3. School of Biomedical Engineering & Health Sciences, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Adrian Curtin

  4. Med-X Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200300, People’s Republic of China

    Adrian Curtin

  5. Shanghai Med-X Engineering Research Center, The School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, People’s Republic of China

    Jie Zhou

  6. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China

    ChaoZhe Zhu

  7. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Psychotic Disorders, Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, 600 Wanping Nan Road, Shanghai, 200030, People’s Republic of China

    TianHong Zhang

  8. Key Laboratory for the Genetics of Developmental and Neuropsychiatric Disorders (Ministry of Education), Bio-X Insitute, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

    JiJun Wang

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  1. YanYan Wei
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Contributions

The study was designed by WJJ and CQ. Funding obtained by ZTH and WYY. WYY and TL collected the data. XLH, TXC, TYY and QZY are recruiting to the study. ZCZ commented on the previous version of the manuscript. WYY and ZJ made the data analysis. The manuscript was drafted by WYY and AC. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to TianHong Zhang or JiJun Wang.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The study was approved by the ethics committee of Shanghai Mental Health Center in 2017. A written informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Additional information

Communicated by Kenji Hashimoto.

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Wei, Y., Chen, Q., Curtin, A. et al. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a tool to assist the diagnosis of major psychiatric disorders in a Chinese population. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 271, 745–757 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01125-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01125-y

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