Enhanced Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Using Integrated Node Embedding and Causal Discovery on Imbalanced fMRI Data

This study introduces a novel diagnostic method for schizophrenia using causal discovery and node embedding techniques on resting-state fMRI data. Data from 148 subjects (27 schizophrenia patients, 121 healthy controls) were analyzed across 116 brain regions, applying several causal discovery techniques to assess directional connectivity and uncover schizophrenia-related patterns. By combining advanced causal discovery with node embedding techniques and a rigorous data-balancing pipeline, our method improves sensitivity to subtle network variations critical for schizophrenia diagnosis. Our approach addresses key challenges in the literature: the difficulty of extracting effective neurobiological markers from noisy and complex fMRI data, the limited interpretability of connectivity networks, and the imbalance in datasets that often skews classification performance. Experimental results demonstrate the pipeline's effectiveness in overcoming imbalanced data challenges and extracting features from noisy and complex data, with Regression Dynamic Causal Modeling (RDCM) achieving the highest classification metrics, including 90.06% accuracy and 89.09% sensitivity. This method identified 15 brain regions with strong diagnostic potential, offering improved sensitivity and specificity for schizophrenia diagnosis Compared to contemporary domain techniques.