ISOMAP and machine learning algorithms for the construction of embedded functional connectivity networks of anatomically separated brain regions fromresting state fMRI data of patients with Schizophrenia

We construct Functional Connectivity Networks (FCN) from resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) recordings towards the classification of brain activity between healthy and schizophrenic subjects using a publicly available dataset (the COBRE dataset) of 145 subjects (74 healthy controls and 71 schizophrenic subjects). First, we match the anatomy of the brain of each individual to the Desikan- Killiany brain atlas. Then, we use the conventional approach of correlating the parcellated time series to construct FCN and ISOMAP, a nonlinear manifold learning algorithm to produce low-dimensional embeddings of the correlation matrices. For the classification analysis, we computed five key local graph-theoretic measures of the FCN and used the LASSO and Random Forest (RF) algorithms for feature selection. For the classification we used standard linear Support Vector Machines. The classification performance is tested by a double cross-validation scheme [consisting of an outer and an inner loop of “Leave one out” cross-validation (LOOCV)]. The standard cross-correlation methodology produced a classification rate of 73.1%, while ISOMAP resulted in 79.3%, thus providing a simpler model with a smaller number of features as chosen from LASSO and RF, namely the participation coefficient of the right thalamus and the strength of the right lingual gyrus

An implicit evolution scheme for active contours and surfaces based on IIR filtering

In this work, we present an approach for implementing an implicit scheme for the numerical solution of the partial differential equation of the evolution of an active contour/surface. The proposed scheme is applicable to any variant of the traditional active contour (AC), irrespectively of the calculation of the image-based force field and it is readily applicable to explicitly parameterized active surfaces (AS). The proposed approach is formulated as an infinite impulse response (IIR) filtering of the coordinates of the contour/surface points. The poles of the filter are determined by the parameters controlling the shape of the active contour/surface. We show that the proposed IIR-based implicit evolution scheme has very low complexity. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is numerically stable, thus it allows the convergence of the AC/AS with significantly fewer iterations than the explicit evolution scheme. It also possesses the separability property along the two parameters of the AS, thus it may be applied to deformable surfaces, without the need to store and invert large sparse matrices. We implemented the proposed IIR-based implicit evolution scheme in the Vector Field Convolution (VFC) AC/AS using synthetic and clinical volumetric data. We compared the segmentation results with those of the explicit AC/AS evolution, in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Results show that the VFC AC/AS with the proposed IIR-based implicit evolution scheme achieves the same segmentation results with the explicit scheme, with considerably less computation time. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved