Predictive modeling for identifying the human brain developmental stages

摘要

The human brain undergoes various structural and functional changes as the age progress. These changes are however gradual and a substantial change is seen only after a certain period of years. This period of years of human life can be hypothesized as the developmental stage of the brain. The work described here proposes novel methodologies to find the developmental stages of the human brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) techniques which have become widely popular in the research community are used in this study. This work uses resting state fMRI data of 1096 healthy subjects(age 9 to 83 years) to find the developmental stages of the brain. A classification model using SVM is also proposed which can classify the subject based on their fMRI data into the developmental stages. The proposed model is 90.4% accurate with specificity and sensitivity as 94.94% and 85.9%. This model can be used in cases of degenerative neurological disorders which lead to abnormal development of brain. For the subjects with a neurological disorder, their brain developmental stage can be obtained using the model and hence inferences can be drawn about the growth of the disorder.