Automatic depression discrimination on FNIRS by using general linear model and SVM

A method is proposed to distinguish patients with depression from healthy persons using data measured by Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (FNIRS) during a cognitive task. Firstly, General Linear Model (GLM) is used to extract features from 52-channel FNIRS data of patients with depression and normal healthy persons. Then a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is designed for classification. The results of experiment show that the method can achieve a satisfactory classification with the accuracy 89.71% for total and 92.59% for patients. Also, the results suggest that FNIRS is a promising clinical technique in the diagnosis and therapy of depression.