Application of principal component analysis to distinguish patients with schizophrenia from healthy controls based on fractional anisotropy measurements.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is often used to reduce the dimension of data before applying more sophisticated data analysis methods such as non-linear classification algorithms or independent component analysis. This practice is based on selecting components corresponding to the largest eigenvalues. If the ultimate goal is separation of data in two groups, then these set of components need not have the most discriminatory power. We measured the distance between two such populations using Mahalanobis distance and chose the eigenvectors to maximize it, a modified PCA method, which we call the discriminant PCA (DPCA). DPCA was applied to diffusion tensor-based fractional anisotropy images to distinguish age-matched schizophrenia subjects from healthy controls. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by the one-leave-out method. We show that for this fractional anisotropy data set, the classification error with 60 components was close to the minimum error and that the Mahalanobis distance was twice as large with DPCA, than with PCA. Finally, by masking the discriminant function with the white matter tracts of the Johns Hopkins University atlas, we identified left superior longitudinal fasciculus as the tract which gave the least classification error. In addition, with six optimally chosen tracts the classification error was zero.