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Poster
Learning Macroscopic Brain Connectomes via Group-Sparse Factorization
Farzane Aminmansour · Andrew Patterson · Lei Le · Yisu Peng · Daniel Mitchell · Franco Pestilli · Cesar F Caiafa · Russell Greiner · Martha White

Wed Dec 11 10:45 AM -- 12:45 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #139
in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science -- Connectomics »

Mapping structural brain connectomes for living human brains typically requires expert analysis and rule-based models on diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. A data-driven approach, however, could overcome limitations in such rule-based approaches and improve precision mappings for individuals. In this work, we explore a framework that facilitates applying learning algorithms to automatically extract brain connectomes. Using a tensor encoding, we design an objective with a group-regularizer that prefers biologically plausible fascicle structure. We show that the objective is convex and has unique solutions, ensuring identifiable connectomes for an individual. We develop an efficient optimization strategy for this extremely high-dimensional sparse problem, by reducing the number of parameters using a greedy algorithm designed specifically for the problem. We show that this greedy algorithm significantly improves on a standard greedy algorithm, called Orthogonal Matching Pursuit. We conclude with an analysis of the solutions found by our method, showing we can accurately reconstruct the diffusion information while maintaining contiguous fascicles with smooth direction changes.

Keywords: Neuroscience · Neuroscience and Cognitive Science · Algorithms -> Representation Learning; Algorithms -> Sparse Coding and Dimensionality Expansion; Applications · Matrix and Ten

Author Information

Farzane Aminmansour (University of Alberta)
Andrew Patterson (University of Alberta)
Lei Le (Amazon)
Yisu Peng (Northeastern University)
Daniel Mitchell (University of Alberta)
Franco Pestilli (Indiana University)
Cesar F Caiafa (CONICET/RIKEN AIP)
Russell Greiner (University of Alberta)
Martha White (University of Alberta)

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