No Arabic abstract
We propose a new framework, called Hierarchical Multi-resolution Mesh Networks (HMMNs), which establishes a set of brain networks at multiple time resolutions of fMRI signal to represent the underlying cognitive process. The suggested framework, first, decomposes the fMRI signal into various frequency subbands using wavelet transforms. Then, a brain network, called mesh network, is formed at each subband by ensembling a set of local meshes. The locality around each anatomic region is defined with respect to a neighborhood system based on functional connectivity. The arc weights of a mesh are estimated by ridge regression formed among the average region time series. In the final step, the adjacency matrices of mesh networks obtained at different subbands are ensembled for brain decoding under a hierarchical learning architecture, called, fuzzy stacked generalization (FSG). Our results on Human Connectome Project task-fMRI dataset reflect that the suggested HMMN model can successfully discriminate tasks by extracting complementary information obtained from mesh arc weights of multiple subbands. We study the topological properties of the mesh networks at different resolutions using the network measures, namely, node degree, node strength, betweenness centrality and global efficiency; and investigate the connectivity of anatomic regions, during a cognitive task. We observe significant variations among the network topologies obtained for different subbands. We, also, analyze the diversity properties of classifier ensemble, trained by the mesh networks in multiple subbands and observe that the classifiers in the ensemble collaborate with each other to fuse the complementary information freed at each subband. We conclude that the fMRI data, recorded during a cognitive task, embed diverse information across the anatomic regions at each resolution.
We represent the sequence of fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain volumes recorded during a cognitive stimulus by a graph which consists of a set of local meshes. The corresponding cognitive process, encoded in the brain, is then represented by these meshes each of which is estimated assuming a linear relationship among the voxel time series in a predefined locality. First, we define the concept of locality in two neighborhood systems, namely, the spatial and functional neighborhoods. Then, we construct spatially and functionally local meshes around each voxel, called seed voxel, by connecting it either to its spatial or functional p-nearest neighbors. The mesh formed around a voxel is a directed sub-graph with a star topology, where the direction of the edges is taken towards the seed voxel at the center of the mesh. We represent the time series recorded at each seed voxel in terms of linear combination of the time series of its p-nearest neighbors in the mesh. The relationships between a seed voxel and its neighbors are represented by the edge weights of each mesh, and are estimated by solving a linear regression equation. The estimated mesh edge weights lead to a better representation of information in the brain for encoding and decoding of the cognitive tasks. We test our model on a visual object recognition and emotional memory retrieval experiments using Support Vector Machines that are trained using the mesh edge weights as features. In the experimental analysis, we observe that the edge weights of the spatial and functional meshes perform better than the state-of-the-art brain decoding models.
Cognitive brain imaging is accumulating datasets about the neural substrate of many different mental processes. Yet, most studies are based on few subjects and have low statistical power. Analyzing data across studies could bring more statistical power; yet the current brain-imaging analytic framework cannot be used at scale as it requires casting all cognitive tasks in a unified theoretical framework. We introduce a new methodology to analyze brain responses across tasks without a joint model of the psychological processes. The method boosts statistical power in small studies with specific cognitive focus by analyzing them jointly with large studies that probe less focal mental processes. Our approach improves decoding performance for 80% of 35 widely-different functional-imaging studies. It finds commonalities across tasks in a data-driven way, via common brain representations that predict mental processes. These are brain networks tuned to psychological manipulations. They outline interpretable and plausible brain structures. The extracted networks have been made available; they can be readily reused in new neuro-imaging studies. We provide a multi-study decoding tool to adapt to new data.
Among the most impressive recent applications of neural decoding is the visual representation decoding, where the category of an object that a subject either sees or imagines is inferred by observing his/her brain activity. Even though there is an increasing interest in the aforementioned visual representation decoding task, there is no extensive study of the effect of using different machine learning models on the decoding accuracy. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of several machine learning models, along with different similarity metrics, for the aforementioned task, drawing many interesting conclusions. That way, this paper a) paves the way for developing more advanced and accurate methods and b) provides an extensive and easily reproducible baseline for the aforementioned decoding task.
Brain imaging data are important in brain sciences yet expensive to obtain, with big volume (i.e., large p) but small sample size (i.e., small n). To tackle this problem, transfer learning is a promising direction that leverages source data to improve performance on related, target data. Most transfer learning methods focus on minimizing data distribution mismatch. However, a big challenge in brain imaging is the large domain discrepancies in cognitive experiment designs and subject-specific structures and functions. A recent transfer learning approach minimizes domain dependence to learn common features across domains, via the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). Inspired by this method, we propose a new Domain Independent Support Vector Machine (DI-SVM) for transfer learning in brain condition decoding. Specifically, DI-SVM simultaneously minimizes the SVM empirical risk and the dependence on domain information via a simplified HSIC. We use public data to construct 13 transfer learning tasks in brain decoding, including three interesting multi-source transfer tasks. Experiments show that DI-SVMs superior performance over eight competing methods on these tasks, particularly an improvement of more than 24% on multi-source transfer tasks.
A key problem in deep multi-attribute learning is to effectively discover the inter-attribute correlation structures. Typically, the conventional deep multi-attribute learning approaches follow the pipeline of manually designing the network architectures based on task-specific expertise prior knowledge and careful network tunings, leading to the inflexibility for various complicated scenarios in practice. Motivated by addressing this problem, we propose an efficient greedy neural architecture search approach (GNAS) to automatically discover the optimal tree-like deep architecture for multi-attribute learning. In a greedy manner, GNAS divides the optimization of global architecture into the optimizations of individual connections step by step. By iteratively updating the local architectures, the global tree-like architecture gets converged where the bottom layers are shared across relevant attributes and the branches in top layers more encode attribute-specific features. Experiments on three benchmark multi-attribute datasets show the effectiveness and compactness of neural architectures derived by GNAS, and also demonstrate the efficiency of GNAS in searching neural architectures.