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

GSplit LBI: Taming the Procedural Bias in Neuroimaging for Disease Prediction

In voxel-based neuroimage analysis, lesion features have been the main focus in disease prediction due to their interpretability with respect to the related diseases. However, we observe that there exists another type of features introduced during the preprocessing steps and we call them "\textbf{Procedural Bias}". Besides, such bias can be leveraged to improve classification accuracy. Nevertheless, most existing models suffer from either under-fit without considering procedural bias or poor interpretability without differentiating such bias from lesion ones. In this paper, a novel dual-task algorithm namely \emph{GSplit LBI} is proposed to resolve this problem. By introducing an augmented variable enforced to be structural sparsity with a variable splitting term, the estimators for prediction and selecting lesion features can be optimized separately and mutually monitored by each other following an iterative scheme. Empirical experiments have been evaluated on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative\thinspace(ADNI) database. The advantage of proposed model is verified by improved stability of selected lesion features and better classification results.Comment: Conditional Accepted by Miccai,201

Scalable Machine Learning Methods for Massive Biomedical Data Analysis.

Modern data acquisition techniques have enabled biomedical researchers to collect and analyze datasets of substantial size and complexity. The massive size of these datasets allows us to comprehensively study the biological system of interest at an unprecedented level of detail, which may lead to the discovery of clinically relevant biomarkers. Nonetheless, the dimensionality of these datasets presents critical computational and statistical challenges, as traditional statistical methods break down when the number of predictors dominates the number of observations, a setting frequently encountered in biomedical data analysis. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that biological data tend to be noisy and often possess complex correlation patterns among the predictors. The central goal of this dissertation is to develop a computationally tractable machine learning framework that allows us to extract scientifically meaningful information from these massive and highly complex biomedical datasets. We motivate the scope of our study by considering two important problems with clinical relevance: (1) uncertainty analysis for biomedical image registration, and (2) psychiatric disease prediction based on functional connectomes, which are high dimensional correlation maps generated from resting state functional MRI.PhDElectrical Engineering: SystemsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111354/1/takanori_1.pd

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

Connectivity-informed Sparse Classifiers for fMRI Brain Decoding

International audienceIn recent years, sparse regularization has become a dominant means for handling the curse of dimensionality in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based brain decoding problems. Enforcing sparsity alone, however, neglects the interactions between connected brain areas. Methods that additionally impose spatial smoothness would account for local but not long-range interactions. In this paper, we propose incorporating connectivity into sparse classifier learning so that both local and long-range connections can be jointly modeled. On real data, we demonstrate that integrating connectivity information inferred from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data provides higher classification accuracy and more interpretable classifier weight patterns than standard classifiers. Our results thus illustrate the benefits of adding neurologically-relevant priors in fMRI brain decoding