Connectomics in neuroimaging : First International Workshop, CNI 2017, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2017, Quebec City, QC, Canada, September 14, 2017, proceedings. CNI (Workshop) (1st : 2017 : Quebec, Quebec)最新文献

We present a shape matching approach for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time course and spectral alignment. We use ideas from differential geometry and functional data analysis to define a functional representation for fMRI signals. The space of fMRI functions is then equipped with a reparameterization invariant Riemannian metric that enables elastic alignment of both amplitude and phase of the fMRI time courses as well as their power spectral densities. Experimental results show significant increases in pairwise node to node correlations and coherences following alignment. We apply this method for finding group differences in connectivity between patients with major depression and healthy controls.

Many existing brain network distances are based on matrix norms. The element-wise differences may fail to capture underlying topological differences. Further, matrix norms are sensitive to outliers. A few extreme edge weights may severely affect the distance. Thus it is necessary to develop network distances that recognize topology. In this paper, we introduce Gromov-Hausdorff (GH) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) distances. GH-distance is often used in persistent homology based brain network models. The superior performance of KS-distance is contrasted against matrix norms and GH-distance in random network simulations with the ground truths. The KS-distance is then applied in characterizing the multimodal MRI and DTI study of maltreated children.

A large body of evidence relates autism with abnormal structural and functional brain connectivity. Structural covariance MRI (scMRI) is a technique that maps brain regions with covarying gray matter density across subjects. It provides a way to probe the anatomical structures underlying intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) through the analysis of the gray matter signal covariance. In this paper, we apply topological data analysis in conjunction with scMRI to explore network-specific differences in the gray matter structure in subjects with autism versus age-, gender- and IQ-matched controls. Specifically, we investigate topological differences in gray matter structures captured by structural covariance networks (SCNs) derived from three ICNs strongly implicated in autism, namely, the salience network (SN), the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network (ECN). By combining topological data analysis with statistical inference, our results provide evidence of statistically significant network-specific structural abnormalities in autism, from SCNs derived from SN and ECN. These differences in brain architecture are consistent with direct structural analysis using scMRI (Zielinski et al. 2012).

Based on the neuroimaging data from a large set of acquired brain injury patients, we investigate the feasibility of using machine learning for automatic prediction of individual consciousness level. Rather than using the traditional Pearson's correlation-based brain functional network, which measures only the simple temporal synchronization of the BOLD signals from each pair of brain regions, we construct a high-order brain functional network that is capable of characterizing topographical information-based high-level functional associations among brain regions. In such a high-order brain network, each node represents the community of a brain region, described by a set of this region's low-order functional associations with other brain regions, and each edge characterizes topographical similarity between a pair of such communities. Experimental results show that the high-order brain functional network enables a significant better classification for consciousness level and recovery outcome prediction.

Human brain functional connectivity (FC) networks, estimated based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), has become a promising tool for imaging-based brain disease diagnosis. Conventional low-order FC network (LON) usually characterizes pairwise temporal correlation of rs-fMRI signals between any pair of brain regions. Meanwhile, high-order FC network (HON) has provided an alternative brain network modeling strategy, characterizing more complex interactions among low-order FC sub-networks that involve multiple brain regions. However, both LON and HON are usually constructed within a fixed and relatively wide frequency band, which may fail in capturing (sensitive) frequency-specific FC changes caused by pathological attacks. To address this issue, we propose a novel "multi-frequency HON construction" method. Specifically, we construct not only multiple frequency-specific HONs (intra-spectrum HONs), but also a series of cross-frequency interaction-based HONs (inter-spectrum HONs) based on the low-order FC sub-networks constructed at different frequency bands. Both types of these HONs, together with the frequency-specific LONs, are used for the complex network analysis-based feature extraction, followed by sparse regression-based feature selection and the classification between mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and normal aging subjects using a support vector machine. Compared with the previous methods, our proposed method achieves the best diagnosis accuracy in early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Meditation practice as a non-pharmacological intervention to provide health related benefits has generated much neuroscientific interest in its effects on brain activity. Electroencephalogram (EEG), an imaging modality known for its inexpensive procedure and excellent temporal resolution, is often utilized to investigate the neuroplastic effects of meditation under various experimental conditions. In these studies, EEG signals are routinely mapped on a topographic layout of channels to visualize variations in spectral powers within certain frequency ranges. Topological data analysis (TDA) of the topographic power maps modeled as graphs can provide different insight to EEG signals than standard statistical methods. A highly effective TDA technique is persistent homology, which reveals topological characteristics of a power map by tracking feature changes throughout a filtration process on the graph structure of the map. In this paper, we propose a novel inference procedure based on filtrations induced by sublevel sets of the power maps of high-density EEG signals. We apply the pipeline to simulated and real data, where we compare the persistent homological features of topographic maps of spectral powers in high-frequency bands of EEG signals recorded on long-term meditators and meditation-naive practitioners.