Enabling Factor Analysis on Thousand-Subject Neuroimaging Datasets

The scale of functional magnetic resonance image data is rapidly increasing as large multi-subject datasets are becoming widely available and high-resolution scanners are adopted. The inherent low-dimensionality of the information in this data has led neuroscientists to consider factor analysis methods to extract and analyze the underlying brain activity. In this work, we consider two recent multi-subject factor analysis methods: the Shared Response Model and Hierarchical Topographic Factor Analysis. We perform analytical, algorithmic, and code optimization to enable multi-node parallel implementations to scale. Single-node improvements result in 99x and 1812x speedups on these two methods, and enables the processing of larger datasets. Our distributed implementations show strong scaling of 3.3x and 5.5x respectively with 20 nodes on real datasets. We also demonstrate weak scaling on a synthetic dataset with 1024 subjects, on up to 1024 nodes and 32,768 cores

AN EVALUATION OF HYPERALIGNMENT ON REPRODUCIBILITY AND PREDICTION ACCURACY FOR FMRI DATA

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique which measures a person's brain activity using changes in the blood flow in response to neural activity. Recently, resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) has become a ubiquitous tool for measuring connectivity and examining the functional architecture of the human brain. Here, we used a publicly available rs-fMRI dataset to investigate the performance of the hyperalignment algorithm, on several fMRI analyses. The research employs the use of the image intra-class correlation coefficient and functional connectome fingerprinting to evaluate the reproducibility of both the unaligned and hyperaligned data, and developed a predictive model to investigate whether hyperalignment improves the prediction of certain behavioral measures. Overall, our results illustrate the utility of the hyperalignment algorithm for studying inter-individual variation in brain activity