Large-scale Granger causality analysis on resting-state functional MRI

Adora M. D'Souza; Anas Zainul Abidin; Lutz Leistritz; Axel Wismüller

doi:10.1117/12.2217264

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29 March 2016 Large-scale Granger causality analysis on resting-state functional MRI

Adora M. D'Souza, Anas Zainul Abidin, Lutz Leistritz, Axel Wismüller

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Proceedings Volume 9788, Medical Imaging 2016: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging; 97880L (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2217264
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2016, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

We demonstrate an approach to measure the information flow between each pair of time series in resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) data of the human brain and subsequently recover its underlying network structure. By integrating dimensionality reduction into predictive time series modeling, large-scale Granger Causality (lsGC) analysis method can reveal directed information flow suggestive of causal influence at an individual voxel level, unlike other multivariate approaches. This method quantifies the influence each voxel time series has on every other voxel time series in a multivariate sense and hence contains information about the underlying dynamics of the whole system, which can be used to reveal functionally connected networks within the brain. To identify such networks, we perform non-metric network clustering, such as accomplished by the Louvain method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to recover the motor and visual cortex from resting state human brain fMRI data and compare it with the network recovered from a visuomotor stimulation experiment, where the similarity is measured by the Dice Coefficient (DC). The best DC obtained was 0.59 implying a strong agreement between the two networks. In addition, we thoroughly study the effect of dimensionality reduction in lsGC analysis on network recovery. We conclude that our approach is capable of detecting causal influence between time series in a multivariate sense, which can be used to segment functionally connected networks in the resting-state fMRI.

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Adora M. D'Souza, Anas Zainul Abidin, Lutz Leistritz, and Axel Wismüller "Large-scale Granger causality analysis on resting-state functional MRI", Proc. SPIE 9788, Medical Imaging 2016: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging, 97880L (29 March 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2217264

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