No Arabic abstract
Brain graph synthesis marked a new era for predicting a target brain graph from a source one without incurring the high acquisition cost and processing time of neuroimaging data. However, existing multi-modal graph synthesis frameworks have several limitations. First, they mainly focus on generating graphs from the same domain (intra-modality), overlooking the rich multimodal representations of brain connectivity (inter-modality). Second, they can only handle isomorphic graph generation tasks, limiting their generalizability to synthesizing target graphs with a different node size and topological structure from those of the source one. More importantly, both target and source domains might have different distributions, which causes a domain fracture between them (i.e., distribution misalignment). To address such challenges, we propose an inter-modality aligner of non-isomorphic graphs (IMANGraphNet) framework to infer a target graph modality based on a given modality. Our three core contributions lie in (i) predicting a target graph (e.g., functional) from a source graph (e.g., morphological) based on a novel graph generative adversarial network (gGAN); (ii) using non-isomorphic graphs for both source and target domains with a different number of nodes, edges and structure; and (iii) enforcing the predicted target distribution to match that of the ground truth graphs using a graph autoencoder to relax the designed loss oprimization. To handle the unstable behavior of gGAN, we design a new Ground Truth-Preserving (GT-P) loss function to guide the generator in learning the topological structure of ground truth brain graphs. Our comprehensive experiments on predicting functional from morphological graphs demonstrate the outperformance of IMANGraphNet in comparison with its variants. This can be further leveraged for integrative and holistic brain mapping in health and disease.
Brain functional network has become an increasingly used approach in understanding brain functions and diseases. Many network construction methods have been developed, whereas the majority of the studies still used static pairwise Pearsons correlation-based functional connectivity. The goal of this work is to introduce a toolbox namely Brain Network Construction and Classification (BrainNetClass) to the field to promote more advanced brain network construction methods. It comprises various brain network construction methods, including some state-of-the-art methods that were recently developed to capture more complex interactions among brain regions along with connectome feature extraction, reduction, parameter optimization towards network-based individualized classification. BrainNetClass is a MATLAB-based, open-source, cross-platform toolbox with graphical user-friendly interfaces for cognitive and clinical neuroscientists to perform rigorous computer-aided diagnosis with interpretable result presentations even though they do not possess neuroimage computing and machine learning knowledge. We demonstrate the implementations of this toolbox on real resting-state functional MRI datasets. BrainNetClass (v1.0) can be downloaded from https://github.com/zzstefan/BrainNetClass.
Deep learning shows high potential for many medical image analysis tasks. Neural networks can work with full-size data without extensive preprocessing and feature generation and, thus, information loss. Recent work has shown that the morphological difference in specific brain regions can be found on MRI with the means of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). However, interpretation of the existing models is based on a region of interest and can not be extended to voxel-wise image interpretation on a whole image. In the current work, we consider the classification task on a large-scale open-source dataset of young healthy subjects -- an exploration of brain differences between men and women. In this paper, we extend the previous findings in gender differences from diffusion-tensor imaging on T1 brain MRI scans. We provide the voxel-wise 3D CNN interpretation comparing the results of three interpretation methods: Meaningful Perturbations, Grad CAM and Guided Backpropagation, and contribute with the open-source library.
Anatomic connections between brain areas affect information flow between neuronal circuits and the synchronization of neuronal activity. However, such structural connectivity does not coincide with effective connectivity, related to the more elusive question Which areas cause the present activity of which others?. Effective connectivity is directed and depends flexibly on contexts and tasks. Here we show that a dynamic effective connectivity can emerge from transitions in the collective organization of coherent neural activity. Integrating simulation and semi-analytic approaches, we study mesoscale network motifs of interacting cortical areas, modeled as large random networks of spiking neurons or as simple rate units. Through a causal analysis of time-series of model neural activity, we show that different dynamical states generated by a same structural connectivity motif correspond to distinct effective connectivity motifs. Such effective motifs can display a dominant directionality, due to spontaneous symmetry breaking and effective entrainment between local brain rhythms, although all connections in the considered structural motifs are reciprocal [...] Finally, we analyze how the information encoded in spiking patterns of a local neuronal population is propagated across a fixed structural connectivity motif, demonstrating that changes in the active effective connectivity regulate both the efficiency and the directionality of information transfer [...] Going beyond these early proposals, we advance here that dynamic interactions between brain rhythms provide as well the basis for the self-organized control of this communication-through-coherence, making thus possible a fast on-demand reconfiguration of global information routing modalities.
As an effective way to integrate the information contained in multiple medical images under different modalities, medical image synthesis and fusion have emerged in various clinical applications such as disease diagnosis and treatment planning. In this paper, an invertible and variable augmented network (iVAN) is proposed for medical image synthesis and fusion. In iVAN, the channel number of the network input and output is the same through variable augmentation technology, and data relevance is enhanced, which is conducive to the generation of characterization information. Meanwhile, the invertible network is used to achieve the bidirectional inference processes. Due to the invertible and variable augmentation schemes, iVAN can not only be applied to the mappings of multi-input to one-output and multi-input to multi-output, but also be applied to one-input to multi-output. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can obtain competitive or superior performance in comparison to representative medical image synthesis and fusion methods.
Multimodal fusion benefits disease diagnosis by providing a more comprehensive perspective. Developing algorithms is challenging due to data heterogeneity and the complex within- and between-modality associations. Deep-network-based data-fusion models have been developed to capture the complex associations and the performance in diagnosis has been improved accordingly. Moving beyond diagnosis prediction, evaluation of disease mechanisms is critically important for biomedical research. Deep-network-based data-fusion models, however, are difficult to interpret, bringing about difficulties for studying biological mechanisms. In this work, we develop an interpretable multimodal fusion model, namely gCAM-CCL, which can perform automated diagnosis and result interpretation simultaneously. The gCAM-CCL model can generate interpretable activation maps, which quantify pixel-level contributions of the input features. This is achieved by combining intermediate feature maps using gradient-based weights. Moreover, the estimated activation maps are class-specific, and the captured cross-data associations are interest/label related, which further facilitates class-specific analysis and biological mechanism analysis. We validate the gCAM-CCL model on a brain imaging-genetic study, and show gCAM-CCLs performed well for both classification and mechanism analysis. Mechanism analysis suggests that during task-fMRI scans, several object recognition related regions of interests (ROIs) are first activated and then several downstream encoding ROIs get involved. Results also suggest that the higher cognition performing group may have stronger neurotransmission signaling while the lower cognition performing group may have problem in brain/neuron development, resulting from genetic variations.