No Arabic abstract
There has been huge interest in studying human brain connectomes inferred from different imaging modalities and exploring their relationship with human traits, such as cognition. Brain connectomes are usually represented as networks, with nodes corresponding to different regions of interest (ROIs) and edges to connection strengths between ROIs. Due to the high-dimensionality and non-Euclidean nature of networks, it is challenging to depict their population distribution and relate them to human traits. Current approaches focus on summarizing the network using either pre-specified topological features or principal components analysis (PCA). In this paper, building on recent advances in deep learning, we develop a nonlinear latent factor model to characterize the population distribution of brain graphs and infer the relationships between brain structural connectomes and human traits. We refer to our method as Graph AuTo-Encoding (GATE). We applied GATE to two large-scale brain imaging datasets, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and the Human Connectome Project (HCP) for adults, to understand the structural brain connectome and its relationship with cognition. Numerical results demonstrate huge advantages of GATE over competitors in terms of prediction accuracy, statistical inference and computing efficiency. We found that structural connectomes have a stronger association with a wide range of human cognitive traits than was apparent using previous approaches.
As deep learning is showing unprecedented success in medical image analysis tasks, the lack of sufficient medical data is emerging as a critical problem. While recent attempts to solve the limited data problem using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been successful in generating realistic images with diversity, most of them are based on image-to-image translation and thus require extensive datasets from different domains. Here, we propose a novel model that can successfully generate 3D brain MRI data from random vectors by learning the data distribution. Our 3D GAN model solves both image blurriness and mode collapse problems by leveraging alpha-GAN that combines the advantages of Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) and GAN with an additional code discriminator network. We also use the Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) loss to lower the training instability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we generate new images of normal brain MRI and show that our model outperforms baseline models in both quantitative and qualitative measurements. We also train the model to synthesize brain disorder MRI data to demonstrate the wide applicability of our model. Our results suggest that the proposed model can successfully generate various types and modalities of 3D whole brain volumes from a small set of training data.
We analyze the complex networks associated with brain electrical activity. Multichannel EEG measurements are first processed to obtain 3D voxel activations using the tomographic algorithm LORETA. Then, the correlation of the current intensity activation between voxel pairs is computed to produce a voxel cross-correlation coefficient matrix. Using several correlation thresholds, the cross-correlation matrix is then transformed into a network connectivity matrix and analyzed. To study a specific example, we selected data from an earlier experiment focusing on the MMN brain wave. The resulting analysis highlights significant differences between the spatial activations associated with Standard and Deviant tones, with interesting physiological implications. When compared to random data networks, physiological networks are more connected, with longer links and shorter path lengths. Furthermore, as compared to the Deviant case, Standard data networks are more connected, with longer links and shorter path lengths--i.e., with a stronger ``small worlds character. The comparison between both networks shows that areas known to be activated in the MMN wave are connected. In particular, the analysis supports the idea that supra-temporal and inferior frontal data work together in the processing of the differences between sounds by highlighting an increased connectivity in the response to a novel sound.
This paper describes an x-ray microtomographic technique for imaging the three-dimensional structure of the human cerebral cortex. Neurons in the brain constitute a neural circuit as a three-dimensional network. The brain tissue is composed of light elements that give little contrast in a hard x-ray transmission image. The contrast was enhanced by staining neural cells with metal compounds. The obtained structure revealed the microarchitecture of the gray and white matter regions of the frontal cortex, which is responsible for the higher brain functions.
Almost all statistical and machine learning methods in analyzing brain networks rely on distances and loss functions, which are mostly Euclidean or matrix norms. The Euclidean or matrix distances may fail to capture underlying subtle topological differences in brain networks. Further, Euclidean distances are sensitive to outliers. A few extreme edge weights may severely affect the distance. Thus it is necessary to use distances and loss functions that recognize topology of data. In this review paper, we survey various topological distance and loss functions from topological data analysis (TDA) and persistent homology that can be used in brain network analysis more effectively. Although there are many recent brain imaging studies that are based on TDA methods, possibly due to the lack of method awareness, TDA has not taken as the mainstream tool in brain imaging field yet. The main purpose of this paper is provide the relevant technical survey of these powerful tools that are immediately applicable to brain network data.
Reconstructing multiple molecularly defined neurons from individual brains and across multiple brain regions can reveal organizational principles of the nervous system. However, high resolution imaging of the whole brain is a technically challenging and slow process. Recently, oblique light sheet microscopy has emerged as a rapid imaging method that can provide whole brain fluorescence microscopy at a voxel size of 0.4 by 0.4 by 2.5 cubic microns. On the other hand, complex image artifacts due to whole-brain coverage produce apparent discontinuities in neuronal arbors. Here, we present connectivity-preserving methods and data augmentation strategies for supervised learning of neuroanatomy from light microscopy using neural networks. We quantify the merit of our approach by implementing an end-to-end automated tracing pipeline. Lastly, we demonstrate a scalable, distributed implementation that can reconstruct the large datasets that sub-micron whole-brain images produce.