Temporal Multiple Kernel Learning (tMKL) model for predicting resting state FC via characterizing fMRI connectivity dynamics

Over the last decade there has been growing interest in understanding the brain activity in the absence of any task or stimulus captured by the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI). These resting state patterns are not static, but exhibit complex spatio-temporal dynamics. In the recent years substantial effort has been put to characterize different FC configurations while brain states makes transitions over time. The dynamics governing this transitions and their relationship with stationary functional connectivity remains elusive. Over the last years a multitude of methods has been proposed to discover and characterize FC dynamics and one of the most accepted method is sliding window approach. Moreover, as these FC configurations are observed to be cyclically repeating in time there was further motivation to use of a generic clustering scheme to identify latent states of dynamics. We discover the underlying lower-dimensional manifold of the temporal structure which is further parameterized as a set of local density distributions, or latent transient states. We propose an innovative method that learns parameters specific to these latent states using a graph-theoretic model (temporal Multiple Kernel Learning, tMKL) and finally predicts the grand average functional connectivity (FC) of the unseen subjects by leveraging a state transition Markov model. tMKL thus learns a mapping between the underlying anatomical network and the temporal structure. Training and testing were done using the rs-fMRI data of 46 healthy participants and the results establish the viability of the proposed solution. Parameters of the model are learned via state-specific optimization formulations and yet the model performs at par or better than state-of-the-art models for predicting the grand average FC. Moreover, the model shows sensitivity towards subject-specific anatomy. The proposed model performs significantly better than the established models of predicting resting state functional connectivity based on whole-brain dynamic mean-field model, single diffusion kernel model and another version of multiple kernel learning model. In summary, We provide a novel solution that does not make strong assumption about underlying data and is generally applicable to resting or task data to learn subject specific state transitions and successful characterization of SC-dFC-FC relationship through an unifying framework.