Exploring Brain Networks via Structured Sparse Representation of fMRI Data

Investigating functional brain networks and activities using sparse representation of fMRI data has received significant interests in the neuroimaging field. It has been reported that sparse representation is effective in reconstructing concurrent and interactive functional brain networks. However, previous data-driven reconstruction approaches rarely simultaneously take consideration of anatomical structures, which are the substrate of brain function. Furthermore, it has been rarely explored whether structured sparse representation with anatomical guidance could facilitate functional networks reconstruction. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose to reconstruct brain networks using the anatomy-guided structured multi-task regression (AGSMR) in which 116 anatomical regions from the AAL template as prior knowledge are employed to guide the network reconstruction. Using the publicly available Human Connectome Project (HCP) Q1 dataset as a test bed, our method demonstrated that anatomical guided structure sparse representation is effective in reconstructing concurrent functional brain networks.