gms | German Medical Science

GMDS 2013: 58. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e. V. (GMDS)

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie

01. - 05.09.2013, Lübeck

Advances and caveats in machine learning approacheson resting-state fMRI connectomes

Meeting Abstract

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  • Norman Scheel - University of Lübeck, Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatic, Lübeck, DE
  • Amir Madany - University of Lübeck, Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatic, Lübeck, DE

GMDS 2013. 58. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V. (GMDS). Lübeck, 01.-05.09.2013. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2013. DocAbstr.313

doi: 10.3205/13gmds313, urn:nbn:de:0183-13gmds3136

Veröffentlicht: 27. August 2013

© 2013 Scheel et al.
Dieser Artikel ist ein Open Access-Artikel und steht unter den Creative Commons Lizenzbedingungen (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.de). Er darf vervielfältigt, verbreitet und öffentlich zugänglich gemacht werden, vorausgesetzt dass Autor und Quelle genannt werden.


Gliederung

Text

Introduction: Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fluctuations measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been studied in various ways. As neuronal activity is mainly responsible for these fluctuations [1] it allows us to investigate the internal functions of the brain. Especially resting state fMRI has drawn more and more attention since its introduction in [2] as task based experiments are rather artificial and limited in their applications. Inferring information from the fMRI of the mind wandering brain may momentarily be the best way to grasp the complex processes of brain-function [3], [4], [5], [6]. One main approach to study resting-state brain connectivity are correlational matrices based on brain segmentations using diverse brain atlases or points of interest (POI's) and different correlation measures. These functional connectivity matrices can be interpreted in the way that they describe the functional interactions of brain regions. For further investigation of these matrices machine learning is recently emerging into the field of neuroscience.

Methods and Material: Already for task fMRI studies, machine learning, esp. Support Vector Machines (SVM's) have proven to be of great value [7], [8]. With the ADHD-200 challenge and the 1000 functional connectomes project [9] machine learning and pattern classification on resting state fMRI became very popular in clinical circumstances.Unfortunately, the complexity of the data as well as missing constraints in the experimental design leads to many problems and challenges for multivariate learning approaches. Here we want to discuss common culprits using a representative open access data set kindly provided by the Beijing Normal University, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning through the INDI 1000 Functional Connectomes Project. In their study they measured 44 students, age 23 ± 2.2 years, 22 female, 22 male, to assess the differences in resting state fMRI of subjects having their eyes open vs. eyes closed.

Results: Using Support Vector Machines we were able to find significant differences between eyes open and eyes closed conditions as well as differences between females and males. Further analysis then showed that most differences are more likely to be associated with subject motion as well as scanner session effects as certain long-range connections disappear when subject motion is ruled out before classification. Another phenomenon is the appearance of negative significant results, where cross-validation (CV) accuracies drop significantly below chance level.

Discussion: Confounds correlated with the group assignment may lead to false positive classifications and just as negative significance it indicates how sensitive multivariate learning is in high-dimensional low-sample size scenarios. As it is uncertain which aspects of data-set generation and preprocessing have an influence on the classification accuracies, there is only the possibility of reverse engineering to rule out as many confounding effects as possible. Even then one might not discover the “true” cause. On the example of the above data, we will discuss the potential advantages of multivariate rs-fMRI data analysis just as well as we will elucidate the caveats regarding interpretation and generalization of such results.


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