Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been widely employed in the objective diagnosis of patients with schizophrenia during a verbal fluency task (VFT). Most of the available methods depended on the time-domain features extracted from the data of single or multiple channels. The present study proposed an alternative method based on the functional connectivity strength (FCS) derived from an individual channel. The data measured 100 patients with schizophrenia and 100 healthy controls, who were used to train the classifiers and to evaluate their performance. Different classifiers were evaluated, and support machine vector achieved the best performance. In order to reduce the dimensional complexity of the feature domain, principal component analysis (PCA) was applied. The classification results by using an individual channel, a combination of several channels, and 52 ensemble channels with and without the dimensional reduced technique were compared. It provided a new approach to identify schizophrenia, improving the objective diagnosis of this mental disorder. FCS from three channels on the medial prefrontal and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortices rendered accuracy as high as 84.67%, sensitivity at 92.00%, and specificity at 70%. The neurophysiological significance of the change at these regions was consistence with the major syndromes of schizophrenia.

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