2,424 research outputs found
Investigating human audio-visual object perception with a combination of hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-testing fMRI analysis tools
Primate multisensory object perception involves distributed brain regions. To investigate the network character of these regions of the human brain, we applied data-driven group spatial independent component analysis (ICA) to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data set acquired during a passive audio-visual (AV) experiment with common object stimuli. We labeled three group-level independent component (IC) maps as auditory (A), visual (V), and AV, based on their spatial layouts and activation time courses. The overlap between these IC maps served as definition of a distributed network of multisensory candidate regions including superior temporal, ventral occipito-temporal, posterior parietal and prefrontal regions. During an independent second fMRI experiment, we explicitly tested their involvement in AV integration. Activations in nine out of these twelve regions met the max-criterion (A < AV > V) for multisensory integration. Comparison of this approach with a general linear model-based region-of-interest definition revealed its complementary value for multisensory neuroimaging. In conclusion, we estimated functional networks of uni- and multisensory functional connectivity from one dataset and validated their functional roles in an independent dataset. These findings demonstrate the particular value of ICA for multisensory neuroimaging research and using independent datasets to test hypotheses generated from a data-driven analysis
Visual Target Modulation of Functional Connectivity Networks Revealed by Self-Organizing Group ICA
We applied a data-driven analysis based on self-organizing group independent component analysis (sogICA) to fMRI data from a three-stimulus visual oddball task. SogICA is particularly suited to the investigation of the underlying functional connectivity and does not rely on a predefined model of the experiment, which overcomes some of the limitations of hypothesis-driven analysis. Unlike most previous applications of ICA in functional imaging, our approach allows the analysis of the data at the group level, which is of particular interest in high order cognitive studies. SogICA is based on the hierarchical clustering of spatially similar independent components, derived from single subject decompositions. We identified four main clusters of components, centered on the posterior cingulate, bilateral insula, bilateral prefrontal cortex, and right posterior parietal and prefrontal cortex, consistently across all participants. Post hoc comparison of time courses revealed that insula, prefrontal cortex and right fronto-parietal components showed higher activity for targets than for distractors. Activation for distractors was higher in the posterior cingulate cortex, where deactivation was observed for targets. While our results conform to previous neuroimaging studies, they also complement conventional results by showing functional connectivity networks with unique contributions to the task that were consistent across subjects. SogICA can thus be used to probe functional networks of active cognitive tasks at the group-level and can provide additional insights to generate new hypotheses for further study
Group Analysis of Self-organizing Maps based on Functional MRI using Restricted Frechet Means
Studies of functional MRI data are increasingly concerned with the estimation
of differences in spatio-temporal networks across groups of subjects or
experimental conditions. Unsupervised clustering and independent component
analysis (ICA) have been used to identify such spatio-temporal networks. While
these approaches have been useful for estimating these networks at the
subject-level, comparisons over groups or experimental conditions require
further methodological development. In this paper, we tackle this problem by
showing how self-organizing maps (SOMs) can be compared within a Frechean
inferential framework. Here, we summarize the mean SOM in each group as a
Frechet mean with respect to a metric on the space of SOMs. We consider the use
of different metrics, and introduce two extensions of the classical sum of
minimum distance (SMD) between two SOMs, which take into account the
spatio-temporal pattern of the fMRI data. The validity of these methods is
illustrated on synthetic data. Through these simulations, we show that the
three metrics of interest behave as expected, in the sense that the ones
capturing temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal aspects of the SOMs are more
likely to reach significance under simulated scenarios characterized by
temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal differences, respectively. In addition, a
re-analysis of a classical experiment on visually-triggered emotions
demonstrates the usefulness of this methodology. In this study, the
multivariate functional patterns typical of the subjects exposed to pleasant
and unpleasant stimuli are found to be more similar than the ones of the
subjects exposed to emotionally neutral stimuli. Taken together, these results
indicate that our proposed methods can cast new light on existing data by
adopting a global analytical perspective on functional MRI paradigms.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. Submitted to Neuroimag
Diffusion map for clustering fMRI spatial maps extracted by independent component analysis
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) produces data about activity
inside the brain, from which spatial maps can be extracted by independent
component analysis (ICA). In datasets, there are n spatial maps that contain p
voxels. The number of voxels is very high compared to the number of analyzed
spatial maps. Clustering of the spatial maps is usually based on correlation
matrices. This usually works well, although such a similarity matrix inherently
can explain only a certain amount of the total variance contained in the
high-dimensional data where n is relatively small but p is large. For
high-dimensional space, it is reasonable to perform dimensionality reduction
before clustering. In this research, we used the recently developed diffusion
map for dimensionality reduction in conjunction with spectral clustering. This
research revealed that the diffusion map based clustering worked as well as the
more traditional methods, and produced more compact clusters when needed.Comment: 6 pages. 8 figures. Copyright (c) 2013 IEEE. Published at 2013 IEEE
International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processin
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
A group model for stable multi-subject ICA on fMRI datasets
Spatial Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is an increasingly used
data-driven method to analyze functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
data. To date, it has been used to extract sets of mutually correlated brain
regions without prior information on the time course of these regions. Some of
these sets of regions, interpreted as functional networks, have recently been
used to provide markers of brain diseases and open the road to paradigm-free
population comparisons. Such group studies raise the question of modeling
subject variability within ICA: how can the patterns representative of a group
be modeled and estimated via ICA for reliable inter-group comparisons? In this
paper, we propose a hierarchical model for patterns in multi-subject fMRI
datasets, akin to mixed-effect group models used in linear-model-based
analysis. We introduce an estimation procedure, CanICA (Canonical ICA), based
on i) probabilistic dimension reduction of the individual data, ii) canonical
correlation analysis to identify a data subspace common to the group iii)
ICA-based pattern extraction. In addition, we introduce a procedure based on
cross-validation to quantify the stability of ICA patterns at the level of the
group. We compare our method with state-of-the-art multi-subject fMRI ICA
methods and show that the features extracted using our procedure are more
reproducible at the group level on two datasets of 12 healthy controls: a
resting-state and a functional localizer study
Contribution of Exploratory Methods to the Investigation of Extended Large-Scale Brain Networks in Functional MRI: Methodologies, Results, and Challenges
A large-scale brain network can be defined as a set of segregated and integrated
regions, that is, distant regions that share strong anatomical connections
and functional interactions. Data-driven investigation of such networks has
recently received a great deal of attention in blood-oxygen-level-dependent
(BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We here review the
rationale for such an investigation, the methods used, the results obtained,
and also discuss some issues that have to be faced for an efficient exploration
Contributions in computational intelligence with results in functional neuroimaging
This thesis applies computational intelligence methodologies to study functional brain images. It is a state-of-the-art application relative to unsupervised learning domain to functional neuroimaging. There are also contributions related to computational intelligence on topics relative to clustering validation and spatio-temporal clustering analysis. Speci_cally, there are the presentation of a new separation measure based on fuzzy sets theory to establish the validity of the fuzzy clustering outcomes and the presentation of a framework to approach the parcellation of functional neuroimages taking in account both spatial and temporal patterns. These contributions have been applied to neuroimages obtained with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, using both active and passive paradigm and using both in-house data and fMRI repository. The results obtained shown, globally, an improvement on the quality of the neuroimaging analysis using the methodological contributions proposed
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