An Approach to Automatically Label & Order Brain Activity/Component Maps

Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a brain imaging technique which provides detailed in-sights into brain function and its disruption in various brain disorders. fMRI data can be analyzed using data-driven or region-of-interest based methods. The data-driven analysis of brain activity maps involves several steps, the first of which is identifying whether the maps capture what might be interpreted as intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) or artifacts. This is followed by linking the ICNs to known anatomical and/or functional parcellations. Optionally, as in the study of functional network connectivity (FNC), rearranging the connectivity graph is also necessary for systematic interpretation. Here we present a toolbox that automates all these processes under minimal or no supervision with high accuracy. We provide a pretrained cross-validated elastic-net regularized general linear model for the noisecloud toolbox to separate the ICNs from artifacts. We include several well-known anatomical and functional parcellations from which researchers can choose to label the activity maps. Finally, we integrate a method for maximizing the within-domain modularity to generate a more systematically structured FNC matrix. We improve upon and integrate existing techniques and new methods to design this toolbox which can take care of all the above needs. Specifically, we show that our pretrained model achieves 89% accuracy and 100% precision at classifying ICNs from artifacts in a validation dataset. Researchers are generating brain imaging data and analyzing brain activity at an ever-increasing rate. The Autolabeller toolbox can help automate such analyses for faster and reproducible research.