Model-based Classification of Pain fMRI Data

Purpose: Classification of Somatoform Pain Disorder with multivariate pattern recognition methods applied to fMRI data. Materials and Methods: 12 subjects with somatoform pain disorder and 13 age-matched healthy controls obtained task-fMRI. The task involved noxious heat stimulation on the inner side of the left forearm. Imaging has been performed with a 1.5 T scanner with EPI sequences (TE: 50ms, TR: 2.51s, voxel size 3×3 x 5mm). After standard pre-processing and automatic parcellation into 90 ROIs by AAL labelling, the data has been analyzed with a novel model-based classifier especially designed for multivari…