6,472 research outputs found
A simple and objective method for reproducible resting state network (RSN) detection in fMRI
Spatial Independent Component Analysis (ICA) decomposes the time by space
functional MRI (fMRI) matrix into a set of 1-D basis time courses and their
associated 3-D spatial maps that are optimized for mutual independence. When
applied to resting state fMRI (rsfMRI), ICA produces several spatial
independent components (ICs) that seem to have biological relevance - the
so-called resting state networks (RSNs). The ICA problem is well posed when the
true data generating process follows a linear mixture of ICs model in terms of
the identifiability of the mixing matrix. However, the contrast function used
for promoting mutual independence in ICA is dependent on the finite amount of
observed data and is potentially non-convex with multiple local minima. Hence,
each run of ICA could produce potentially different IC estimates even for the
same data. One technique to deal with this run-to-run variability of ICA was
proposed by Yang et al. (2008) in their algorithm RAICAR which allows for the
selection of only those ICs that have a high run-to-run reproducibility. We
propose an enhancement to the original RAICAR algorithm that enables us to
assign reproducibility p-values to each IC and allows for an objective
assessment of both within subject and across subjects reproducibility. We call
the resulting algorithm RAICAR-N (N stands for null hypothesis test), and we
have applied it to publicly available human rsfMRI data (http://www.nitrc.org).
Our reproducibility analyses indicated that many of the published RSNs in
rsfMRI literature are highly reproducible. However, we found several other RSNs
that are highly reproducible but not frequently listed in the literature.Comment: 54 pages, 13 figure
Modeling Covariate Effects in Group Independent Component Analysis with Applications to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Independent component analysis (ICA) is a powerful computational tool for
separating independent source signals from their linear mixtures. ICA has been
widely applied in neuroimaging studies to identify and characterize underlying
brain functional networks. An important goal in such studies is to assess the
effects of subjects' clinical and demographic covariates on the spatial
distributions of the functional networks. Currently, covariate effects are not
incorporated in existing group ICA decomposition methods. Hence, they can only
be evaluated through ad-hoc approaches which may not be accurate in many cases.
In this paper, we propose a hierarchical covariate ICA model that provides a
formal statistical framework for estimating and testing covariate effects in
ICA decomposition. A maximum likelihood method is proposed for estimating the
covariate ICA model. We develop two expectation-maximization (EM) algorithms to
obtain maximum likelihood estimates. The first is an exact EM algorithm, which
has analytically tractable E-step and M-step. Additionally, we propose a
subspace-based approximate EM, which can significantly reduce computational
time while still retain high model-fitting accuracy. Furthermore, to test
covariate effects on the functional networks, we develop a voxel-wise
approximate inference procedure which eliminates the needs of computationally
expensive covariance estimation. The performance of the proposed methods is
evaluated via simulation studies. The application is illustrated through an
fMRI study of Zen meditation.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figure
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