Differentiation of Schizophrenia by Combining the Spatial EEG Brain Network Patterns of Rest and Task P300.

The P300 is regarded as a psychosis endophenotype of schizophrenia and a putative biomarker of risk for schizophrenia. However, the brain activity (i.e., P300 amplitude) during tasks cannot always provide satisfying discrimination of patients with schizophrenia (SZs) from healthy controls (HCs). Spontaneous activity at rest indices the potential of the brain, such that if the task information can be efficiently processed, it provides a compensatory understanding of the cognitive deficits in SZs. In this study, based on the resting and P300 task electroencephalogram (EEG) data sets, we constructed functional EEG networks and then extracted the inherent Spatial Pattern of Network (SPN) features for both brain states. Finally, the combined SPN features of the rest and task networks were used to recognize SZs. The findings of this study revealed that the combined SPN features could achieve the highest accuracy of 90.48%, with the sensitivity of 89.47% and specificity of 91.30%. These findings consistently implied that the rest and task P300 EEGs could actually provide comprehensive information to reliably classify SZs from HCs, and the SPN is a promising tool for the clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia.