Identifying predictive regions from fMRI with TV-L1 prior

International audienceDecoding, i.e. predicting stimulus related quantities from functional brain images, is a powerful tool to demonstrate differences between brain activity across conditions. However, unlike standard brain mapping, it offers no guaranties on the localization of this information. Here, we consider decoding as a statistical estimation problem and show that injecting a spatial segmentation prior leads to unmatched performance in recovering predictive regions. Specifically, we use L1 penalization to set voxels to zero and Total-Variation (TV) penalization to segment regions. Our contribution is two-fold. On the one hand, we show via extensive experiments that, amongst a large selection of decoding and brain-mapping strategies, TV+L1 leads to best region recovery. On the other hand, we consider implementation issues related to this estimator. To tackle efficiently this joint prediction-segmentation problem we introduce a fast optimization algorithm based on a primal-dual approach. We also tackle automatic setting of hyper-parameters and fast computation of image operation on the irregular masks that arise in brain imaging

Social-sparsity brain decoders: faster spatial sparsity

Spatially-sparse predictors are good models for brain decoding: they give accurate predictions and their weight maps are interpretable as they focus on a small number of regions. However, the state of the art, based on total variation or graph-net, is computationally costly. Here we introduce sparsity in the local neighborhood of each voxel with social-sparsity, a structured shrinkage operator. We find that, on brain imaging classification problems, social-sparsity performs almost as well as total-variation models and better than graph-net, for a fraction of the computational cost. It also very clearly outlines predictive regions. We give details of the model and the algorithm.Comment: in Pattern Recognition in NeuroImaging, Jun 2016, Trento, Italy. 201

Integrating Multimodal Priors in Predictive Models for the Functional Characterization of Alzheimer's Disease

International audienceFunctional brain imaging provides key information to characterize neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Specifically, the metabolic activity measured through fluorodeoxyglu-cose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) and the connectivity extracted from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are promising biomarkers that can be used for early assessment and prognosis of the disease and to understand its mechanisms. FDG-PET is the best suited functional marker so far, as it gives a reliable quantitative measure, but is invasive. On the other hand, non-invasive fMRI acquisitions do not provide a straightforward quantification of brain functional activity. To analyze populations solely based on resting-state fMRI, we propose an approach that leverages a metabolic prior learned from FDG-PET. More formally, our classification framework embeds population priors learned from another modality at the voxel-level, which can be seen as a regularization term in the analysis. Experimental results show that our PET-informed approach increases classification accuracy compared to pure fMRI approaches and highlights regions known to be impacted by the disease

Stable Feature Selection from Brain sMRI

Neuroimage analysis usually involves learning thousands or even millions of variables using only a limited number of samples. In this regard, sparse models, e.g. the lasso, are applied to select the optimal features and achieve high diagnosis accuracy. The lasso, however, usually results in independent unstable features. Stability, a manifest of reproducibility of statistical results subject to reasonable perturbations to data and the model, is an important focus in statistics, especially in the analysis of high dimensional data. In this paper, we explore a nonnegative generalized fused lasso model for stable feature selection in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. In addition to sparsity, our model incorporates two important pathological priors: the spatial cohesion of lesion voxels and the positive correlation between the features and the disease labels. To optimize the model, we propose an efficient algorithm by proving a novel link between total variation and fast network flow algorithms via conic duality. Experiments show that the proposed nonnegative model performs much better in exploring the intrinsic structure of data via selecting stable features compared with other state-of-the-arts

FAASTA: A fast solver for total-variation regularization of ill-conditioned problems with application to brain imaging

The total variation (TV) penalty, as many other analysis-sparsity problems, does not lead to separable factors or a proximal operatorwith a closed-form expression, such as soft thresholding for the $\ell\_1$ penalty. As a result, in a variational formulation of an inverse problem or statisticallearning estimation, it leads to challenging non-smooth optimization problemsthat are often solved with elaborate single-step first-order methods. When thedata-fit term arises from empirical measurements, as in brain imaging, it isoften very ill-conditioned and without simple structure. In this situation, in proximal splitting methods, the computation cost of thegradient step can easily dominate each iteration. Thus it is beneficialto minimize the number of gradient steps.We present fAASTA, a variant of FISTA, that relies on an internal solver forthe TV proximal operator, and refines its tolerance to balance computationalcost of the gradient and the proximal steps. We give benchmarks andillustrations on "brain decoding": recovering brain maps from noisymeasurements to predict observed behavior. The algorithm as well as theempirical study of convergence speed are valuable for any non-exact proximaloperator, in particular analysis-sparsity problems

Total Variation meets Sparsity: statistical learning with segmenting penalties

International audiencePrediction from medical images is a valuable aid to diagnosis. For instance, anatomical MR images can reveal certain disease conditions, while their functional counterparts can predict neuropsychi-atric phenotypes. However, a physician will not rely on predictions by black-box models: understanding the anatomical or functional features that underpin decision is critical. Generally, the weight vectors of clas-sifiers are not easily amenable to such an examination: Often there is no apparent structure. Indeed, this is not only a prediction task, but also an inverse problem that calls for adequate regularization. We address this challenge by introducing a convex region-selecting penalty. Our penalty combines total-variation regularization, enforcing spatial conti-guity, and 1 regularization, enforcing sparsity, into one group: Voxels are either active with non-zero spatial derivative or zero with inactive spatial derivative. This leads to segmenting contiguous spatial regions (inside which the signal can vary freely) against a background of zeros. Such segmentation of medical images in a target-informed manner is an important analysis tool. On several prediction problems from brain MRI, the penalty shows good segmentation. Given the size of medical images, computational efficiency is key. Keeping this in mind, we contribute an efficient optimization scheme that brings significant computational gains