ICA-based sparse feature recovery from fMRI datasets

Spatial Independent Components Analysis (ICA) is increasingly used in the context of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study cognition and brain pathologies. Salient features present in some of the extracted Independent Components (ICs) can be interpreted as brain networks, but the segmentation of the corresponding regions from ICs is still ill-controlled. Here we propose a new ICA-based procedure for extraction of sparse features from fMRI datasets. Specifically, we introduce a new thresholding procedure that controls the deviation from isotropy in the ICA mixing model. Unlike current heuristics, our procedure guarantees an exact, possibly conservative, level of specificity in feature detection. We evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the method on synthetic and fMRI data and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches

Formal Models of the Network Co-occurrence Underlying Mental Operations

International audienceSystems neuroscience has identified a set of canonical large-scale networks in humans. These have predominantly been characterized by resting-state analyses of the task-uncon-strained, mind-wandering brain. Their explicit relationship to defined task performance is largely unknown and remains challenging. The present work contributes a multivariate statistical learning approach that can extract the major brain networks and quantify their configuration during various psychological tasks. The method is validated in two extensive datasets (n = 500 and n = 81) by model-based generation of synthetic activity maps from recombination of shared network topographies. To study a use case, we formally revisited the poorly understood difference between neural activity underlying idling versus goal-directed behavior. We demonstrate that task-specific neural activity patterns can be explained by plausible combinations of resting-state networks. The possibility of decomposing a mental task into the relative contributions of major brain networks, the "network co-occurrence architecture" of a given task, opens an alternative access to the neural substrates of human cognition

Learning and comparing functional connectomes across subjects

Functional connectomes capture brain interactions via synchronized fluctuations in the functional magnetic resonance imaging signal. If measured during rest, they map the intrinsic functional architecture of the brain. With task-driven experiments they represent integration mechanisms between specialized brain areas. Analyzing their variability across subjects and conditions can reveal markers of brain pathologies and mechanisms underlying cognition. Methods of estimating functional connectomes from the imaging signal have undergone rapid developments and the literature is full of diverse strategies for comparing them. This review aims to clarify links across functional-connectivity methods as well as to expose different steps to perform a group study of functional connectomes

Any-way and Sparse Analyses for Multimodal Fusion and Imaging Genomics

This dissertation aims to develop new algorithms that leverage sparsity and mutual information across data modalities built upon the independent component analysis (ICA) framework to improve the performance of current ICA-based multimodal fusion approaches. These algorithms are further applied to both simulated data and real neuroimaging and genomic data to examine their performance. The identified neuroimaging and genomic patterns can help better delineate the pathology of mental disorders or brain development. To alleviate the signal-background separation difficulties in infomax-decomposed sources for genomic data, we propose a sparse infomax by enhancing a robust sparsity measure, the Hoyer index. Hoyer index is scale-invariant and well suited for ICA frameworks since the scale of decomposed sources is arbitrary. Simulation results demonstrate that sparse infomax increases the component detection accuracy for situations where the source signal-to-background (SBR) ratio is low, particularly for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. The proposed sparse infomax is further extended into two data modalities as a sparse parallel ICA for applications to imaging genomics in order to investigate the associations between brain imaging and genomics. Simulation results show that sparse parallel ICA outperforms parallel ICA with improved accuracy for structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI)-SNP association detection and component spatial map recovery, as well as with enhanced sparsity for sMRI and SNP components under noisy cases. Applying the proposed sparse parallel ICA to fuse the whole-brain sMRI and whole-genome SNP data of 24985 participants in the UK biobank, we identify three stable and replicable sMRI-SNP pairs. The identified sMRI components highlight frontal, parietal, and temporal regions and associate with multiple cognitive measures (with different association strengths in different age groups for the temporal component). Top SNPs in the identified SNP factor are enriched in inflammatory disease and inflammatory response pathways, which also regulate gene expression, isoform percentage, transcription expression, or methylation level in the frontal region, and the regulation effects are significantly enriched. Applying the proposed sparse parallel ICA to imaging genomics in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), we identify and replicate one SNP component related to gray matter volume (GMV) alterations in superior and middle frontal gyri underlying working memory deficit in adults and adolescents with ADHD. The association is more significant in ADHD families than controls and stronger in adults and older adolescents than younger ones. The identified SNP component highlights SNPs in long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in chromosome 5 and in several protein-coding genes that are involved in ADHD, such as MEF2C, CADM2, and CADPS2. Top SNPs are enriched in human brain neuron cells and regulate gene expression, isoform percentage, transcription expression, or methylation level in the frontal region. Moreover, to increase the flexibility and robustness in mining multimodal data, we propose aNy-way ICA, which optimizes the entire correlation structure of linked components across any number of modalities via the Gaussian independent vector analysis and simultaneously optimizes independence via separate (parallel) ICAs. Simulation results demonstrate that aNy-way ICA recover sources and loadings, as well as the true covariance patterns with improved accuracy compared to existing multimodal fusion approaches, especially under noisy conditions. Applying the proposed aNy-way ICA to integrate structural MRI, fractal n-back, and emotion identification task functional MRIs collected in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC), we identify and replicate one linked GMV-threat-2-back component, and the threat and 2-back components are related to intelligence quotient (IQ) score in both discovery and replication samples. Lastly, we extend the proposed aNy-way ICA with a reference constraint to enable prior-guided multimodal fusion. Simulation results show that aNy-way ICA with reference recovers the designed linkages between reference and modalities, cross-modality correlations, as well as loading and component matrices with improved accuracy compared to multi-site canonical correlation analysis with reference (MCCAR)+joint ICA under noisy conditions. Applying aNy-way ICA with reference to supervise structural MRI, fractal n-back, and emotion identification task functional MRIs fusion in PNC with IQ as the reference, we identify and replicate one IQ-related GMV-threat-2-back component, and this component is significantly correlated across modalities in both discovery and replication samples.Ph.D

Tensor Analysis and Fusion of Multimodal Brain Images

Current high-throughput data acquisition technologies probe dynamical systems with different imaging modalities, generating massive data sets at different spatial and temporal resolutions posing challenging problems in multimodal data fusion. A case in point is the attempt to parse out the brain structures and networks that underpin human cognitive processes by analysis of different neuroimaging modalities (functional MRI, EEG, NIRS etc.). We emphasize that the multimodal, multi-scale nature of neuroimaging data is well reflected by a multi-way (tensor) structure where the underlying processes can be summarized by a relatively small number of components or "atoms". We introduce Markov-Penrose diagrams - an integration of Bayesian DAG and tensor network notation in order to analyze these models. These diagrams not only clarify matrix and tensor EEG and fMRI time/frequency analysis and inverse problems, but also help understand multimodal fusion via Multiway Partial Least Squares and Coupled Matrix-Tensor Factorization. We show here, for the first time, that Granger causal analysis of brain networks is a tensor regression problem, thus allowing the atomic decomposition of brain networks. Analysis of EEG and fMRI recordings shows the potential of the methods and suggests their use in other scientific domains.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figures, submitted to Proceedings of the IEE