fMRI-S4: learning short- and long-range dynamic fMRI dependencies using 1D Convolutions and State Space Models

Single-subject mapping of resting-state brain functional activity to non-imaging phenotypes is a major goal of neuroimaging. The large majority of learning approaches applied today rely either on static representations or on short-term temporal correlations. This is at odds with the nature of brain activity which is dynamic and exhibit both short- and long-range dependencies. Further, new sophisticated deep learning approaches have been developed and validated on single tasks/datasets. The application of these models for the study of a different targets typically require exhaustive hyperparameter search, model engineering and trial and error to obtain competitive results with simpler linear models. This in turn limit their adoption and hinder fair benchmarking in a rapidly developing area of research. To this end, we propose fMRI-S4; a versatile deep learning model for the classification of phenotypes and psychiatric disorders from the timecourses of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. fMRI-S4 capture short- and long- range temporal dependencies in the signal using 1D convolutions and the recently introduced state-space models S4. The proposed architecture is lightweight, sample-efficient and robust across tasks/datasets. We validate fMRI-S4 on the tasks of diagnosing major depressive disorder (MDD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and sex classifcation on three multi-site rs-fMRI datasets. We show that fMRI-S4 can outperform existing methods on all three tasks and can be trained as a plug&play model without special hyperpararameter tuning for each setting

Dynamic Adaptive Spatio-temporal Graph Convolution for fMRI Modelling

The characterisation of the brain as a functional network in which the connections between brain regions are represented by correlation values across time series has been very popular in the last years. Although this representation has advanced our understanding of brain function, it represents a simplified model of brain connectivity that has a complex dynamic spatio-temporal nature. Oversimplification of the data may hinder the merits of applying advanced non-linear feature extraction algorithms. To this end, we propose a dynamic adaptive spatio-temporal graph convolution (DAST-GCN) model to overcome the shortcomings of pre-defined static correlation-based graph structures. The proposed approach allows end-to-end inference of dynamic connections between brain regions via layer-wise graph structure learning module while mapping brain connectivity to a phenotype in a supervised learning framework. This leverages the computational power of the model, data and targets to represent brain connectivity, and could enable the identification of potential biomarkers for the supervised target in question. We evaluate our pipeline on the UKBiobank dataset for age and gender classification tasks from resting-state functional scans and show that it outperforms currently adapted linear and non-linear methods in neuroimaging. Further, we assess the generalizability of the inferred graph structure by transferring the pre-trained graph to an independent dataset for the same task. Our results demonstrate the task-robustness of the graph against different scanning parameters and demographics.

A Hybrid 3DCNN and 3DC-LSTM based model for 4D Spatio-temporal fMRI data: An ABIDE Autism Classification study

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) captures the temporal dynamics of neural activity as a function of spatial location in the brain. Thus, fMRI scans are represented as 4-Dimensional (3-space + 1-time) tensors. And it is widely believed that the spatio-temporal patterns in fMRI manifests as behaviour and clinical symptoms. Because of the high dimensionality ($\sim$ 1 Million) of fMRI, and the added constraints of limited cardinality of data sets, extracting such patterns are challenging. A standard approach to overcome these hurdles is to reduce the dimensionality of the data by either summarizing activation over time or space at the expense of possible loss of useful information. Here, we introduce an end-to-end algorithm capable of extracting spatiotemporal features from the full 4-D data using 3-D CNNs and 3-D Convolutional LSTMs. We evaluate our proposed model on the publicly available ABIDE dataset to demonstrate the capability of our model to classify Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) from resting-state fMRI data. Our results show that the proposed model achieves state of the art results on single sites with F1-scores of 0.78 and 0.7 on NYU and UM sites, respectively.