Machine learning studies on major brain diseases: 5-year trends of 2014–2018

In the recent 5 years (2014–2018), there has been growing interest in the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to explore image diagnosis and prognosis of therapeutic lesion changes within the area of neuroradiology. However, to date, the majority of research trend and current status have not been clearly illuminated in the neuroradiology field. More than 1000 papers have been published during the past 5 years on subject classification and prediction focused on multiple brain disorders. We provide a survey of 209 papers in this field with a focus on top ten active areas of research; i.e., Alzheimer’s disease/mild cognitive impairment, brain tumor; schizophrenia, depressive disorders, Parkinson’s disease, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, stroke, and traumatic brain injury. Detailed information of these studies, such as ML methods, sample size, type of inputted features and reported accuracy, are summarized. This paper reviews the evidences, current limitations and status of studies using ML to assess brain disorders in neuroimaging data. The main bottleneck of this research field is still the limited sample size, which could be potentially addressed by modern data sharing models, such as ADNI.