Application of Autoencoder in Depression Diagnosis

Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a mental disorder characterized by at least two weeks of low mood which is present across most situations. Diagnosis of MDD using rest-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data faces many challenges due to the high dimensionality, small samples, noisy and individual variability. No method can automatically extract discriminative features from the origin time series in fMRI images for MDD diagnosis. In this study, we proposed a new method for feature extraction and a workflow which can make an automatic feature extraction and classification without a prior knowledge. An autoencoder was used to learn pre-training parameters of a dimensionality reduction process using 3-D convolution network. Through comparison with the other three feature extraction methods, our method achieved the best classification performance. This method can be used not only in MDD diagnosis, but also other similar disorders.