Hemodynamic-informed parcellation of fMRI data in a Joint Detection Estimation framework

International audienceIdentifying brain hemodynamics in event-related functional MRI (fMRI) data is a crucial issue to disentangle the vascular response from the neuronal activity in the BOLD signal. This question is usually addressed by estimating the so-called Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF). Voxelwise or region-/parcelwise inference schemes have been proposed to achieve this goal but so far all known contributions commit to pre-specified spatial supports for the hemodynamic territories by defining these supports either as individual voxels or a priori fixed brain parcels. In this paper, we introduce a Joint Parcellation-Detection-Estimation (JPDE) procedure that incorporates an adaptive parcel identification step based upon local hemodynamic properties. Efficient inference of both evoked activity, HRF shapes and supports is then achieved using variational approximations. Validation on synthetic and real fMRI data demonstrate the JPDE performance over standard detection estimation schemes and suggest it as a new brain exploration tool

Variational solution to the joint detection estimation of brain activity in fMRI

International audienceWe address the issue of jointly detecting brain activity and estimating underlying brain hemodynamics from functional MRI data. We adopt the so-called Joint Detection Estimation (JDE) framework that takes spatial dependencies between voxels into account. We recast the JDE into a missing data framework and derive a Variational Expectation-Maximization (VEM) algorithm for its inference. It follows a new algorithm that has interesting advantages over the previously used intensive simulation methods (Markov Chain Monte Carlo, MCMC): tests on artificial data show that the VEM-JDE is more robust to model mis-specification while additional tests on real data confirm that it achieves similar performance in much less computation time

A Variational Bayesian approach for the Joint Detection Estimation of Brain Activity in functional MRI

National audienceNous abordons dans cet article le problème de la détection-estimation jointe de l'activité cérébrale en IRM fonctionnelle. Pour ce faire, nous adoptons le cadre JDE d'eveloppé dans [1] et étendu dans [2] avec un modèle de champ de Markov caché afin de considérer les dépendances spatiales entre les voxels. Cette extension est essentielle mais induit une grande complexité opératoire qui a été contournée dans [2] en utilisant des méthodes de simulation stochastique (MCMC) qui sont très coûteuses en temps de calcul. Nous proposons ici une alternative pour lever cette limitation en reformulant le cadre JDE en un probléme à données manquantes en utilisant pour l'inférence un algorithme EM dans lequel nous mettons en oeuvre des techniques d'approximation variationnelle. Des illustrations sur des données artificielles réalistes montrent que l'algorithme EM variationnel permet de d'epasser les performances de l'approche MCMC