Functional Brain Network Estimation with Time Series Self-scrubbing

Functional brain network (FBN) has been becoming an increasingly important measurement for exploring the cerebral working mechanism and mining informative biomarkers for assisting diagnosis of some neurodegenerative disorders. Despite its potential performance in discovering the valuable patterns hidden in the brains, the estimated FBNs are often heavily influenced by the quality of the observed data (e.g., BOLD signal series). In practice, a preprocessing pipeline is usually employed for improving the data quality prior to the FBN estimation; but, even so, some data points in the time series are still not clean enough, possibly including original artifacts (e.g., micro head motion), non-resting functional disturbing (e.g., mind-wandering), and new “noises” caused by the preprocessing pipeline per se. Therefore, not all data points in the time series can contribute to the subsequent FBN estimation. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel FBN estimation method by introducing a latent variable as an indicator of the data quality, and develop an alternating optimization algorithm for scrubbing the data and estimating FBN simultaneously in a single framework. As a result, we can obtain more accurate FBNs with the self-scrubbing data. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on two publicly available datasets to identify mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients from normal control (NC) subjects based on the estimated FBNs. Experimental results show that the proposed FBN modelling method can achieve higher classification accuracy, significantly outperforming the baseline methods.