A fully-automatic caudate nucleus segmentation of brain MRI: Application in volumetric analysis of pediatric attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Background Accurate automatic segmentation of the caudate nucleus in magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain is of great interest in the analysis of developmental disorders. Segmentation methods based on a single atlas or on multiple atlases have been shown to suitably localize caudate structure. However, the atlas prior information may not represent the structure of interest correctly. It may therefore be useful to introduce a more flexible technique for accurate segmentations. Method We present Cau-dateCut: a new fully-automatic method of segmenting the caudate nucleus in MRI. CaudateCut combines an atlas-based segmentation strategy with the Graph Cut energy-minimization framework. We adapt the Graph Cut model to make it suitable for segmenting small, low-contrast structures, such as the caudate nucleus, by defining new energy function data and boundary potentials. In particular, we exploit information concerning the intensity and geometry, and we add supervised energies based on contextual brain structures. Furthermore, we reinforce boundary detection using a new multi-scale edgeness measure. Results We apply the novel CaudateCut method to the segmentation of the caudate nucleus to a new set of 39 pediatric attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) patients and 40 control children, as well as to a public database of 18 subjects. We evaluate the quality of the segmentation using several volumetric and voxel by voxel measures. Our results show improved performance in terms of segmentation compared to state-of-the-art approaches, obtaining a mean overlap of 80.75%. Moreover, we present a quantitative volumetric analysis of caudate abnormalities in pediatric ADHD, the results of which show strong correlation with expert manual analysis. Conclusion CaudateCut generates segmentation results that are comparable to gold-standard segmentations and which are reliable in the analysis of differentiating neuroanatomical abnormalities between healthy controls and pediatric ADHD

The Impact of Statistical Learning on Language and Social Competency in ASD and ADHD: Divergent Findings

Statistical learning is a process that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment and plays an important role in language acquisition, speech segmentation, and aspects of social behaviour. Little is known about the contribution of statistical learning impairments on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) related traits. The current study examined whether impairments in auditory and visual statistical learning are related to ASD and ADHD traits, language, and social competency. Decreased auditory, but not visual statistical learning abilities was related to increased autism traits and visual statistical learning and social competency abilities were mediated by language comprehension. However, no evidence of impaired statistical learning was found in ADHD. Findings highlight the importance of investigating the cascading impact of statistical learning on language and social competency in developmental disorders as well as implementing a more dimensional approach to future studies to capture a broader range of symptoms

Spatio-spectral patterns based on stein kernel for EEG signal classification

El trastorno por déficit de atención con hiperactividad (TDAH) es un trastorno neurológico de inicio en la niñez que puede persistir en la adolescencia y la vida adulta, reduciendo la concentración, la memoria y la productividad. El principal inconveniente de las anomalías de la salud mental de este tipo es la técnica de diagnóstico tradicional, ya que se basa exclusivamente en una descripción sintomatológica sin considerar ningún dato biológico, lo que genera altas tasas de sobrediagnóstico. Para abordar el problema anterior, los investigadores clínicos están intentando extraer biomarcadores de TDAH a partir de señales electroencefalográficas (EEG) registradas. Entre los biomarcadores más comunes se encuentran la relación Theta / Beta y P300, de los cuales estudios recientes han demostrado una falta de importancia en las diferencias entre el TDAH y los sujetos de control. Además, otro gran desafío en el procesamiento del electroencefalograma viene dado por la sensibilidad de las señales, ya que pueden verse fácilmente afectadas por ruidos de fondo, artefactos musculares, movimientos de la cabeza y parpadeos que perjudican enormemente su calidad, lo que limita su introducción en aplicaciones del mundo real. Este trabajo propone una metodología de representación de señales de EEG para identificar discrepancias de respuestas inhibitorias en el sujeto, decodificar la estructura de datos y respaldar el diagnóstico de trastornos mentales. Para esto, primero desarrollamos un enfoque de extracción de características basado en los patrones espaciales comunes (CSP) de las señales de EEG para respaldar el diagnóstico de TDAH como se muestra en el capítulo 3. Luego, desarrollamos una metodología para la representación de señales de EEG que utiliza la similitud entre series de tiempo a través de sus matrices de covarianza en la variedad riemanniana de matrices semidefinitas positivas (PSD), utilizando la divergencia logdet de Jensen Bregman, el kernel de Stein y la alineación de kernel centrada (CKA) como una función de costo para realizar una optimización de filtros espaciales. Finalmente, en el capítulo 5 presentamos una metodología para el apoyo diagnóstico del TDAH. La propuesta implica el uso de los patrones espaciales óptimos desarrollados en el capítulo 4, una descomposición en los ritmos cerebrales y la decodificación discriminativa del capítulo 3. Las características subjetivas resultantes alimentaron un análisis discriminante lineal como herramienta de diagnóstico. La tasa de precisión alcanzada del 93% demuestra que el índice discriminativo basado en los patrones espaciales de stein supera a los biomarcadores convencionales en el diagnóstico de TDAH.Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a childhood-onset neurological disorder that can persist in adolescence and adult life, reducing concentration, memory, and productivity. The main drawback with mental health abnormalities of this type is the traditional diagnostic technique. Since this is based exclusively on a symptomatological description without considering any biological data, leading to high overdiagnosis rates. To address the above problem, clinical researchers are attempting to extract ADHD biomarkers from recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Among the most common biomarkers are Theta/Beta Ratio and P300, of which recent studies have shown a lack of significance on the differences between ADHD and control subjects. Besides, another great challenge in EEG processing is given by the sensitivity of the signals, since they can be easily affected by background noise, muscle artifacts, head movements and flickering that greatly impair their quality, which limits its introduction into real world applications. This work proposes an EEG signal representation methodology for identifying subject-wise discrepancies of inhibitory responses, decoding the data structure, and supporting diagnosis of mental disorders. For this, first we develop a feature extraction approach based on the common spatial patterns (CSP) from EEG signals to support the ADHD diagnosis as show in chapter 3. Then, we develop a methodology for the representation of EEG signals that uses the similarity between time series through their covariance matrices in the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices (PSD), using the logdet-divergence of Jensen Bregman, the Stein kernel, and Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) as a cost function to perform a spatial filters optimization. Finally, in chapter 5 we present a methodology for the diagnostic support of ADHD. The proposal involves the use of the optimal spatial patterns developed in chapter 4, a decomposition in brain rhythms, and the discriminative decoding of chapter 3. The resulting subject-wise features fed a linear discriminant analysis as the supported-diagnosis tool. Achieved 93% accuracy rate proves that the discriminative index based on the stein spatial patterns outperforms conventional biomarkers in the ADHD diagnosis.MaestríaMagíster en Ingeniería EléctricaContents 1 List of Symbols and Abbreviations 6 1.1 Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.2 Abbrevations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2 Introduction 8 2.1 Problem statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2 Justification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.3 State of the art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.4 Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.4.1 General objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.4.2 Specific objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 3 CSP-based discriminative capacity index from EEG 13 3.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.1.1 Common Spatial Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.1.2 Discriminative decoding of CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3.2 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3.2.1 Synthetic EEG records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3.2.2 Real EEG records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3.2.3 Proposed scheme for feature extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.3.1 Discriminative decoding on simulated data . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.3.2 Feature extraction by discriminative decoding . . . . . . . . . 21 3.3.3 Diagnostic support of ADHD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4 Multiple Kernel Stein Spatial Patterns 24 4.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 4.1.1 EEG Decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 4.1.2 Time-Series Similarity through the Stein Kernel for PSD Matrices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 4.1.3 Spatial Filter Optimization Using Centered Kernel Alignment 27 4.1.4 Assembling of Multiple Kernel Representations . . . . . . . . 27 4.2 Experimental Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 4.2.1 Dataset IIa from BCI Competition IV (BCICIV2a) . . . . . . 28 4.2.2 Proposed BCI Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 4.3.1 Performance Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 4.3.2 Model Interpretability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 5 SSP-based discriminative capacity index from EEG supporting ADHD di agnosis 37 5.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 5.1.1 Brain rhythms EEG decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 5.1.2 Stein Spatial Patterns (SSP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 5.1.3 Discriminative decoding of SSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 5.1.4 Generative-supervised feature relevance . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 5.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 6 Conclusions 45 6.1 Future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Spatio-spectral patterns based on Stein kernel for EEG signal classification

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a childhood-onset neurological disorder that can persist in adolescence and adult life, reducing concentration, memory, and productivity. The main drawback with mental health abnormalities of this type is the traditional diagnostic technique. Since this is based exclusively on a symptomatological description without considering any biological data, leading to high overdiagnosis rates. To address the above problem, clinical researchers are attempting to extract ADHD biomarkers from recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Among the most common biomarkers are Theta/Beta Ratio and P300, of which recent studies have shown a lack of significance on the differences between ADHD and control subjects. Besides, another great challenge in EEG processing is given by the sensitivity of the signals, since they can be easily affected by background noise, muscle artifacts, head movements and flickering that greatly impair their quality, which limits its introduction into real world applications. This work proposes an EEG signal representation methodology for identifying subject-wise discrepancies of inhibitory responses, decoding the data structure, and supporting diagnosis of mental disorders. For this, first we develop a feature extraction approach based on the common spatial patterns (CSP) from EEG signals to support the ADHD diagnosis as show in Chapter..

Gray matter covariations and core symptoms of autism: the EU-AIMS Longitudinal European Autism Project.

BACKGROUND: Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies in autism spectrum disorder (autism) have yielded diverging results. This might partly be attributed to structural alterations being associating with the combined influence of several regions rather than with a single region. Further, these structural covariation differences may relate to continuous measures of autism rather than with categorical case-control contrasts. The current study aimed to identify structural covariation alterations in autism, and assessed canonical correlations between brain covariation patterns and core autism symptoms. METHODS: We studied 347 individuals with autism and 252 typically developing individuals, aged between 6 and 30 years, who have been deeply phenotyped in the Longitudinal European Autism Project. All participants' VBM maps were decomposed into spatially independent components using independent component analysis. A generalized linear model (GLM) was used to examine case-control differences. Next, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) was performed to separately explore the integrated effects between all the brain sources of gray matter variation and two sets of core autism symptoms. RESULTS: GLM analyses showed significant case-control differences for two independent components. The first component was primarily associated with decreased density of bilateral insula, inferior frontal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex, and increased density of caudate nucleus in the autism group relative to typically developing individuals. The second component was related to decreased densities of the bilateral amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus in the autism group relative to typically developing individuals. The CCA results showed significant correlations between components that involved variation of thalamus, putamen, precentral gyrus, frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes, and the cerebellum, and repetitive, rigid and stereotyped behaviors and abnormal sensory behaviors in autism individuals. LIMITATIONS: Only 55.9% of the participants with autism had complete questionnaire data on continuous parent-reported symptom measures. CONCLUSIONS: Covaried areas associated with autism diagnosis and/or symptoms are scattered across the whole brain and include the limbic system, basal ganglia, thalamus, cerebellum, precentral gyrus, and parts of the frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes. Some of these areas potentially subserve social-communicative behavior, whereas others may underpin sensory processing and integration, and motor behavior

Neuropsychiatric Disease Classification Using Functional Connectomics - Results of the Connectomics in NeuroImaging Transfer Learning Challenge

Large, open-source datasets, such as the Human Connectome Project and the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange, have spurred the development of new and increasingly powerful machine learning approaches for brain connectomics. However, one key question remains: are we capturing biologically relevant and generalizable information about the brain, or are we simply overfitting to the data? To answer this, we organized a scientific challenge, the Connectomics in NeuroImaging Transfer Learning Challenge (CNI-TLC), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2019. CNI-TLC included two classification tasks: (1) diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) within a pre-adolescent cohort; and (2) transference of the ADHD model to a related cohort of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) patients with an ADHD comorbidity. In total, 240 resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) time series averaged according to three standard parcellation atlases, along with clinical diagnosis, were released for training and validation (120 neurotypical controls and 120 ADHD). We also provided Challenge participants with demographic information of age, sex, IQ, and handedness. The second set of 100 subjects (50 neurotypical controls, 25 ADHD, and 25 ASD with ADHD comorbidity) was used for testing. Classification methodologies were submitted in a standardized format as containerized Docker images through ChRIS, an open-source image analysis platform. Utilizing an inclusive approach, we ranked the methods based on 16 metrics: accuracy, area under the curve, F1-score, false discovery rate, false negative rate, false omission rate, false positive rate, geometric mean, informedness, markedness, Matthew’s correlation coefficient, negative predictive value, optimized precision, precision, sensitivity, and specificity. The final rank was calculated using the rank product for each participant across all measures. Furthermore, we assessed the calibration curves of each methodology. Five participants submitted their method for evaluation, with one outperforming all other methods in both ADHD and ASD classification. However, further improvements are still needed to reach the clinical translation of functional connectomics. We have kept the CNI-TLC open as a publicly available resource for developing and validating new classification methodologies in the field of connectomics

Automatic Autism Spectrum Disorder Detection Using Artificial Intelligence Methods with MRI Neuroimaging: A Review

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a brain condition characterized by diverse signs and symptoms that appear in early childhood. ASD is also associated with communication deficits and repetitive behavior in affected individuals. Various ASD detection methods have been developed, including neuroimaging modalities and psychological tests. Among these methods, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging modalities are of paramount importance to physicians. Clinicians rely on MRI modalities to diagnose ASD accurately. The MRI modalities are non-invasive methods that include functional (fMRI) and structural (sMRI) neuroimaging methods. However, the process of diagnosing ASD with fMRI and sMRI for specialists is often laborious and time-consuming; therefore, several computer-aided design systems (CADS) based on artificial intelligence (AI) have been developed to assist the specialist physicians. Conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are the most popular schemes of AI used for diagnosing ASD. This study aims to review the automated detection of ASD using AI. We review several CADS that have been developed using ML techniques for the automated diagnosis of ASD using MRI modalities. There has been very limited work on the use of DL techniques to develop automated diagnostic models for ASD. A summary of the studies developed using DL is provided in the appendix. Then, the challenges encountered during the automated diagnosis of ASD using MRI and AI techniques are described in detail. Additionally, a graphical comparison of studies using ML and DL to diagnose ASD automatically is discussed. We conclude by suggesting future approaches to detecting ASDs using AI techniques and MRI neuroimaging

A preliminary exploration of the relationship between gray and white matter neurometabolites, neuropsychological function, and functional impairment in young adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has gained acceptance as a neurobiological disorder, supported by a growing body of literature that documents differences in brain structure and function in individuals diagnosed with ADHD. There is growing interest in exploring patterns of neurometabolite concentrations through the methods of proton spectroscopy (1H-MRS). Previous studies have employed single voxel techniques, examining neurometabolite concentrations in small, localized regions of brain tissue. This study is the first to employ Spectroscopic Imaging (SI), which allows for acquisition of neurometabolite spectra from a larger sample of brain tissue, in the cerebral cortex of individuals diagnosed with ADHD. Nine adolescents and young adults diagnosed ADHD and twelve control participants were enrolled in the study. Similar to previous findings, the ADHD group demonstrated significant reductions in gray matter volumes of brain regions relevant for sustained attention, inhibition, and working memory. Additionally, performance on measures of visual-spatial problem solving, academic achievement, and cognitive flexibility/response inhibition was more impaired than controls. Preliminary analyses of the SI neurometabolite data revealed few significant results, but several trends were noted, including some sex-related differences in neurometabolite concentrations. As anticipated, different patterns of correlations between neurometabolite concentrations and performance on measures of attention were discovered for the ADHD group in comparison to controls. The present study also sought to extend the literature on ADHD by providing a preliminary exploration of neurometabolite concentrations in late adolescence in the context of functional impairment in young adulthood. Although many individuals report symptom remediation when they enter adulthood, functional outcomes indicate that the impact of the disorder is far reaching, impacting aspects of quality of life, academic achievement, employment, relationships, and engagement in risk behaviors. Difficulties in collection of follow-up data limited the findings regarding functional outcome and neurological correlates. Implications and ideas for future research involving 1H-MRS techniques and ADHD are discussed. Overall, the study highlights trends and patterns indicative of a unique neurometabolic profile of individuals with ADHD, suggesting that additional longitudinal research is necessary to advance our understanding of this developmental disorder