Exploratory data-driven methods such as unsupervised clustering and independent component analysis (ICA) are considered to be hypothesis-generating procedures, and are complementary to the hypothesis-led statistical inferential methods in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this paper, we present a comparison between unsupervised clustering and ICA in a systematic fMRI study. The comparative results were evaluated by 1) task-related activation maps, 2) associated time-courses, and 3) receiver operating characteristic analysis. For the fMRI data, a comparative quantitative evaluation between the three clustering techniques, self-organizing map, "neural gas" network, and fuzzy clustering based on deterministic annealing, and the three ICA methods, FastICA, Infomax and topographic ICA was performed. The ICA methods proved to extract features relatively well for a small number of independent components but are limited to the linear mixture assumption. The unsupervised Clustering outperforms ICA in terms of classification results but requires a longer processing time than the ICA methods.
Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has found use in mammography for imaging the entire breast with sufficient spatial resolution at a radiation dose within the range of that of conventional mammography. Recently, enhancement of lesion tissue through the use of contrast agents has been proposed for cone beam CT. This study investigates whether the use of such contrast agents improves the ability of texture features to differentiate lesion texture from healthy tissue on CBCT in an automated manner. For this purpose, 9 lesions were annotated by an experienced radiologist on both regular and contrast-enhanced CBCT images using two-dimensional (2D) square ROIs. These lesions were then segmented, and each pixel within the lesion ROI was assigned a label – lesion or non-lesion, based on the segmentation mask. On both sets of CBCT images, four three-dimensional (3D) Minkowski Functionals were used to characterize the local topology at each pixel. The resulting feature vectors were then used in a machine learning task involving support vector regression with a linear kernel (SVRlin) to classify each pixel as belonging to the lesion or non-lesion region of the ROI. Classification performance was assessed using the area under the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Minkowski Functionals derived from contrast-enhanced CBCT images were found to exhibit significantly better performance at distinguishing between lesion and non-lesion areas within the ROI when compared to those extracted from CBCT images without contrast enhancement (p < 0.05). Thus, contrast enhancement in CBCT can improve the ability of texture features to distinguish lesions from surrounding healthy tissue.
High dimensional functional MRI data in combination with a low temporal resolution imposes computational limits on classical Granger Causality analyses with respect to a large-scale representations of functional interactions in the brain. To overcome these limitations and exploit information inherent in resulting brain connectivity networks at the large scale, we propose a multivariate Granger Causality approach with embedded dimension reduction. Using this approach, we computed binary connectivity networks from resting state fMRI images and analyzed them with respect to network module structure, which might be linked to distinct brain regions with an increased density of particular interaction patterns as compared to inter-module regions. As a proof of concept, we show that the modular structure of these large-scale connectivity networks can be recovered. These results are promising since further analysis of large-scale brain network partitions into modules might prove valuable for understanding and tracing changes in brain connectivity at a more detailed resolution level than before.
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