Multivariate classification based on large-scale brain networks during early abstinence predicted lapse among male detoxified alcohol-dependent patients

Identifying biomarkers to predict lapse of alcohol-dependence (AD) is essential for treatment and prevention strategies, but remains remarkably challenging. With an aim to identify neuroimaging features for predicting AD lapse, 66 male AD patients during early-abstinence (baseline) after hospitalized detoxification underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and were then followed-up for 6 months. The relevance-vector-machine (RVM) analysis on baseline large-scale brain networks yielded an elegant model for differentiating relapsing patients (n = 38) from abstainers, with the area under the curve of 0.912 and the accuracy by leave-one-out cross-validation of 0.833. This model captured key information about neuro-connectome biomarkers for predicting AD lapse.