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2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro
For medical image analysis, the test statistic of the measurements is usually constructed at every voxels in space and thresholded to determine the regions of significant signals. This thresholding produces a small patch of regions around the critical values of the test statistic. It is known that the probability of the critical values bigger than a specific threshold can be computed as the expectation of the Euler characteristic of the patch. Motivated by this topological connection, we present a new computational framework of modeling various functional measurements as topological objects. The level set associated with functional measurements can be approximated using a simplicial complex consisting of nodes and links. The existence of links basically determine the underlying topological structure of the signal. The strength of links can be modeled using an underdetermined linear model. By incorporating sparsity into the model, the links can be sparsely obtained making interpretation and visualization of the simplicial complex easier. The main contribution of this paper is showing the relationship between sparse topological structures to the sparse regression framework. We apply this novel framework in constructing a structural brain network model.
NeuroImage, 2021
Developing sensitive and reliable methods to distinguish normal and abnormal brain states is a key neuroscientific challenge. Topological Data Analysis, despite its relative novelty, already generated many promising applications, including in neuroscience. We conjecture its prominent tool of persistent homology may benefit from going beyond analysing structural and functional connectivity to effective connectivity graphs capturing the direct causal interactions or information flows. Therefore, we assess the potential of persistent homology to directed brain network analysis by testing its discriminatory power in two enigmatic examples of disease-related brain connectivity alterations: epilepsy and schizophrenia. We estimate connectivity from functional magnetic resonance imaging and electrophysiology data, employ Persistent Homology and quantify its ability to distinguish healthy from diseased brain states by applying a support vector machine to features quantifying persistent homology structure. We show how this novel approach compares to classification using standard undirected approaches and original connectivity matrices. In the schizophrenia classification, topological data analysis generally performs close to random, while classifications from raw connectivity perform substantially better; likely due to topographical, rather than topological, specificity of the differences. In seizure discrimination from scalp electroencephalography data, classification based on directed persistent homology features provided comparable results to other methods, reaching 89 percent accuracy. Specific niche for topological data analysis opens when direct comparison of connectivity matrices is unsuitable-such as for intracranial electrophysiology with individual number and location of measurements. While standard homology performed overall better than directed homology, this could be due to notorious technical problems of accurate effective connectivity estimation.
2020
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a crucial technology for gaining insights into cognitive processes in humans. Data amassed from fMRI measurements result in volumetric data sets that vary over time. However, analysing such data presents a challenge due to the large degree of noise, and person-to-person variation in how information is represented in the brain. To address this challenge, we present a novel topological approach that encodes each time point in an fMRI data set as a persistence diagram of topological features, i.e. high-dimensional voids present in the data. This representation naturally does not rely on voxel-by-voxel correspondence and is robust towards noise. We show that these time-varying persistence diagrams can be clustered to find meaningful groupings between participants, and that they are also useful in studying within-subject brain state trajectories as each subject is performing a task, for example. Here, we apply both clustering and trajectory...
NeuroReport, 2013
Although several brain regions show significant specialization, higher functions such as cross-modal information integration, abstract reasoning and conscious awareness are viewed as emerging from interactions across distributed functional networks. Analytical approaches capable of capturing the properties of such networks can therefore enhance our ability to make inferences from functional MRI, electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography data. Graph theory is a branch of mathematics that focuses on the formal modelling of networks and offers a wide range of theoretical tools to quantify specific features of network architecture (topology) that can provide information complementing the anatomical localization of areas responding to given stimuli or tasks (topography). Explicit modelling of the architecture of axonal connections and interactions among areas can furthermore reveal peculiar topological properties that are conserved across diverse biological networks, and highly sensitive to disease states. The field is evolving rapidly, partly fuelled by computational developments that enable the study of connectivity at fine anatomical detail and the simultaneous interactions among multiple regions. Recent publications in this area have shown that graph-based modelling can enhance our ability to draw causal inferences from functional MRI experiments, and support the early detection of disconnection and the modelling of pathology spread in neurodegenerative disease, particularly Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, neurophysiological studies have shown that network topology has a profound link to epileptogenesis and that connectivity indices derived from graph models aid in modelling the onset and spread of seizures. Graph-based analyses may therefore significantly help understand the bases of a range of neurological conditions. This review is designed to provide an overview of graph-based analyses of brain connectivity and their relevance to disease aimed principally at general neuroscientists and clinicians.
The anatomical structure of the brain can be observed via non-invasive techniques such as diffusion imaging. However, these are imperfect because they miss connections that are actually known to exist, especially long range interhemispheric ones. In this paper we formulate the inverse problem of inferring the structural connectivity of brain networks from experimentally observed functional connectivity via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), by formulating it as a convex optimization problem. We show that structural connectivity can be modeled as an optimal sparse representation derived from the much denser functional connectivity in the human brain. Using only the functional connectivity data as input, we present (a) an optimization problem that models constraints based on known physiological observations, and (b) an ADMM algorithm for solving it. The algorithm not only recovers the known structural connectivity of the brain, but is also able to robustly predict the long range interhemispheric connections missed by DSI or DTI, including a very good match with experimentally observed quantitative distributions of the weights/strength of anatomical connections. We demonstrate results on both synthetic model data and a fine-scale 998 node cortical dataset, and discuss applications to other complex network domains where retrieving effective structure from functional signatures are important.
arXiv (Cornell University), 2021
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.
Statistica Sinica, 2008
The processing of massive data generated by bioinformatic and neuroscience studies is a current challenge to statisticians since they require the development of computationally efficient and stable algorithms that can deal with many more variables than observations. In neuroscience, a clear example of this situation is the estimation of brain physiological interactions through the analysis of fMRI time series. The widespread use of the General Linear Model in the resolution of these problems has now been enhanced by the addition of prior assumptions, such as the sparseness and/or the spatiotemporal smoothness of a desirable solution (Valdes-Sosa ). In this context, the use of Local Quadratic Approximation (LQA) (Fan and Li ) and the Minorization-Maximization (MM) Hunter and Li ) algorithms are practical ways for estimating the sparse models. Recently, we have extended these techniques to allow the combination of these attractive properties (Valdes-Sosa et al. (2006)). Here, we further formalize the methods and introduce a feature selection algorithm for feasible implementation. The methodology is then applied to the estimation of voxel-based brain effective connectivity using simulated and neuroimaging data.
An information theoretic approach is proposed to estimate the degree of connectivity for each voxel with its neighboring voxels. The neighborhood system is defined by spatial and functional connectivity metrics. Then, a local mesh of variable size is formed around each voxel using spatial or functional neighborhood. The mesh arc weights, called Mesh Arc Descriptors (MAD), are estimated by a linear regression model fitted to the voxel intensity values of the functional Magnetic Resonance Images (fMRI). Finally, the error term of the linear regression equation is used to estimate the mesh size for a voxel by optimizing Akaike's information Criterion, Bayesian Information Criterion and Rissanen's Minimum Description Length. fMRI measurements are obtained during a memory encoding and retrieval experiment performed on a subject who is exposed to the stimuli from 10 semantic categories. For each sample, a k-NN classifier is trained using the Mesh Arc Descriptors (MAD) having the variable mesh sizes. The classification performances reflect that the suggested variable-size Mesh Arc Descriptors represents the mental states better than the classical multi-voxel pattern representation. Moreover, we observe that the degree of connectivities in the brain greatly varies for each voxel.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
The estimation of intra-subject functional connectivity is greatly complicated by the small sample size and complex noise structure in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Pooling samples across subjects improves the conditioning of the estimation, but loses subject-specific connectivity information. In this paper, we propose a new sparse group Gaussian graphical model (SGGGM) that facilitates joint estimation of intra-subject and group-level connectivity. This is achieved by casting functional connectivity estimation as a regularized consensus optimization problem, in which information across subjects is aggregated in learning group-level connectivity and group information is propagated back in estimating intra-subject connectivity. On synthetic data, we show that incorporating group information using SGGGM significantly enhances intra-subject connectivity estimation over existing techniques. More accurate group-level connectivity is also obtained. On real data from a cohort of 60 subjects, we show that integrating intra-subject connectivity estimated with SGGGM significantly improves brain activation detection over connectivity priors derived from other graphical modeling approaches.
2000
Medical imaging can provide data for useful views of the interior details of human anatomy. In addition to visualization, which in general has been the primary reason for obtaining these data, many other uses are possible. These include modeling of different elements and their interrelationships -topological modeling, simulation of physical processes, analysis of movements, and validation of models. Here, we describe some of the modeling issues from medical imaging. The issues are particularly related to topological modeling of different anatomical elements: bones, muscles, articulations, etc. A three-dimensional topological modeler is presented with which anatomists and other users can build a topological database containing structural, topological, and mechanical information of anatomical elements.
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2015
Sparse systems are usually parameterized by a tuning parameter that determines the sparsity of the system. How to choose the right tuning parameter is a fundamental and difficult problem in learning the sparse system. In this paper, by treating the the tuning parameter as an additional dimension, persistent homological structures over the parameter space is introduced and explored. The structures are then further exploited in speeding up the computation using the proposed soft-thresholding technique. The topological structures are further used as multivariate features in the tensor-based morphometry (TBM) in characterizing white matter alterations in children who have experienced severe early life stress and maltreatment. These analyses reveal that stress-exposed children exhibit more diffuse anatomical organization across the whole white matter region. * Asterisk indicates corresponding author. M.K. Chung is with
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
Despite the clear potential benefits of combining fMRI and diffusion MRI in learning the neural pathways that underlie brain functions, little methodological progress has been made in this direction. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal integration approach based on sparse Gaussian graphical model for estimating brain connectivity. Casting functional connectivity estimation as a sparse inverse covariance learning problem, we adapt the level of sparse penalization on each connection based on its anatomical capacity for functional interactions. Functional connections with little anatomical support are thus more heavily penalized. For validation, we showed on real data collected from a cohort of 60 subjects that additionally modeling anatomical capacity significantly increases subject consistency in the detected connection patterns. Moreover, we demonstrated that incorporating a connectivity prior learned with our multimodal connectivity estimation approach improves activation detection.
2021
The identification of the organization principles on the basis of the brain connectivity can be performed in terms of structural (i.e., morphological), functional (i.e., statistical), or effective (i.e., causal) connectivity. If structural connectivity is based on the detection of the morphological (synaptically mediated) links among neurons, functional and effective relationships derive from the recording of the patterns of electrophysiological activity (e.g., spikes, local field potentials). Correlation or information theory-based algorithms are typical routes pursued to find statistical dependencies and to build a functional connectivity matrix. As long as the matrix collects the possible associations among the network nodes, each interaction between the neuron i and j is different from zero, even though there was no morphological, statistical or causal connection between them. Hence, it becomes essential to find and identify only the significant functional connections that are p...
Nature Scientific Reports, 2019
The analysis of the brain from a connectivity perspective is revealing novel insights into brain structure and function. Discovery is, however, hindered by the lack of prior knowledge used to make hypotheses. Additionally, exploratory data analysis is made complex by the high dimensionality of data. Indeed, to assess the effect of pathological states on brain networks, neuroscientists are often required to evaluate experimental effects in case-control studies, with hundreds of thousands of connections. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify the multivariate relationships in brain connections that characterize two distinct groups, hence permitting the investigators to immediately discover the subnetworks that contain information about the differences between experimental groups. In particular, we are interested in data discovery related to connectomics, where the connections that characterize differences between two groups of subjects are found. Nevertheless, those connections do not necessarily maximize the accuracy in classification since this does not guarantee reliable interpretation of specific differences between groups. In practice, our method exploits recent machine learning techniques employing sparsity to deal with weighted networks describing the whole-brain macro connectivity. We evaluated our technique on functional and structural connectomes from human and murine brain data. In our experiments, we automatically identified disease-relevant connections in datasets with supervised and unsupervised anatomy-driven parcellation approaches and by using high-dimensional datasets. The analysis of brain networks, or connectomes, is a recent and exciting advancement in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that promises to identify new phenotypes for healthy, diseased or aging brains 1. A connectome is a comprehensive map of the connections in the brain, which is conceived as a network, where brain areas (nodes) are connected by links (edges) 2 , and connections can be either given by white matter tracts between pairs of brain regions or by an index of the correlation of functional activity 3. This approach allows for analyzing the brain as a complex system of dynamically interacting components without explicitly relying on local activation or brain morphology.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2015
Understanding brain connectivity has become one of the most important issues in neuroscience. But connectivity data can reflect either the functional relationships of the brain activities or the anatomical properties between brain areas. Although one should expect a clear relationship between both representations it is not straightforward. Here we present a formalism that allows for the comparison of structural (DTI) and functional (fMRI) networks by embedding both in a common metric space. In this metric space one can then find for which regions the two networks are significantly different. Our methodology can be used not only to compare multimodal networks but also to extract statistically significant aggregated networks of a set of subjects. Actually, we use this procedure to aggregate a set of functional (fMRI) * [email protected] 1 arXiv:1504.02265v2 [q-bio.NC] 10 Apr 2015 networks from different subjects in an aggregated network that is compared with the anatomical (DTI) connectivity. The comparison of the aggregated network reveals some features that are not observed when the comparison is done with the classical averaged network.
arXiv: Quantitative Methods, 2019
Understanding how the spatial structure of blood vessel networks relates to their function in healthy and abnormal biological tissues could improve diagnosis and treatment for diseases such as cancer. New imaging techniques can generate multiple, high-resolution images of the same tissue region, and show how vessel networks evolve during disease onset and treatment. Such experimental advances have created an exciting opportunity for discovering new links between vessel structure and disease through the development of mathematical tools that can analyse these rich datasets. Here we explain how topological data analysis (TDA) can be used to study vessel network structures. TDA is a growing field in the mathematical and computational sciences, that consists of algorithmic methods for identifying global and multi-scale structures in high-dimensional data sets that may be noisy and incomplete. TDA has identified the effect of ageing on vessel networks in the brain and more recently propo...
Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention : MICCAI ... International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, 2013
The Allen Brain Atlas (ABA) database provides comprehensive 3D atlas of gene expression in the adult mouse brain for studying the spatial expression patterns in the mammalian central nervous system. It is computationally challenging to construct the accurate anatomical and genetic networks using the ABA 4D data. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse simplex model to accurately construct the brain anatomical and genetic networks, which are important to reveal the brain spatial expression patterns. Our new approach addresses the shift-invariant and parameter tuning problems, which are notorious in the existing network analysis methods, such that the proposed model is more suitable for solving practical biomedical problems. We validate our new model using the 4D ABA data, and the network construction results show the superior performance of the proposed sparse simplex model.
Sparse, irregular sampling is becoming a necessity for reconstructing large and high-dimensional signals. However, the analysis of this type of data remains a challenge. One issue is the robust selection of neighborhoods--a crucial part of analytic tools such as topological decomposition, clustering and gradient estimation. When extracting the topology of sparsely sampled data, common neighborhood strategies such as k-nearest neighbors may lead to inaccurate results, either due to missing neighborhood connections, which introduce false extrema, or due to spurious connections, which conceal true extrema. Other neighborhoods, such as the Delaunay triangulation, are costly to compute and store even in relatively low dimensions. In this paper, we address these issues. We present two new types of neighborhood graphs: a variation on and a generalization of empty region graphs, which considerably improve the robustness of neighborhood-based analysis tools, such as topological decomposition.Our findings suggest that these neighborhood graphs lead to more accurate topological representations of low- and high- dimensional data sets at relatively low cost, both in terms of storage and computation time.We describe the implications of our work in the analysis and visualization of scalar functions, and provide general strategies for computing and applying our neighborhood graphs towards robust data analysis.
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2022
Sparse representations have been utilized to identify functional connectivity (FC) of networks, while ICA employs the assumption of independence among the network sources to demonstrate FC. Here, we investigate a sparse decomposition method based on Morphological Component Analysis and K-SVD dictionary learning-MCA-KSVD-and contrast the effect of the sparsity constraint vs. the independency constraint on FC and denoising. Methods: Using a K-SVD algorithm, fMRI signals are decomposed into morphological components which have sparse spatial overlap. We present simulations when the independency assumption of ICA fails and MCA-KSVD recovers more accurate spatial-temporal structures. Denoising performance of both methods is investigated at various noise levels. A comprehensive experimental study was conducted on resting-state and task fMRI. Results: Validations show that ICA is advantageous when network components are well-separated and sparse. In such cases, the MCA-KSVD method has modest value over ICA in terms of network delineation but is significantly more effective in reducing spatial and temporal noise. Results demonstrate that the sparsity constraint yields sparser networks with higher spatial resolution while suppressing weak signals. Temporally, this localization effect yields higher contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs) of time series. Conclusion: While marginally improving the spatial decomposition, MCA-KSVD denoises fMRI data much more effectively than ICA, preserving network structures and improving CNR, especially for weak networks. Significance: A sparsity-based decomposition approach may be useful for investigating functional connectivity in noisy cases. It may serve as an efficient decomposition method for reduced acquisition time and may prove useful for detecting weak network activations.
In the present study a novel data-driven topological filtering technique is introduced to derive the backbone of functional brain networks relying on orthogonal minimal spanning trees (OMST). The method aims to identify the essential functional connections to ensure optimal information flow via the objective criterion of global efficiency minus the cost of surviving connections. The OMST technique was applied to multichannel, resting-state neuromagnetic recordings from four groups of participants: healthy adults (n=50), adults who have suffered mild traumatic brain injury (n=30), typically developing children (n=27), and reading-disabled children (n=25). Weighted interactions between network nodes (sensors) were computed using an integrated approach of dominant intrinsic coupling modes based on two alternative metrics (symbolic mutual information and phase lag index), resulting in excellent discrimination of individual cases according to their group membership. Classification result...
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