Reference-Relation Guided Autoencoder with Deep CCA Restriction for Awake-to-Sleep Brain Functional Connectome Prediction

The difficulty of acquiring resting-state fMRI of early developing children under the same condition leads to a dedicated protocol, i.e., scanning younger infants during sleep and older children during being awake, respectively. However, the obviously different brain activities of sleep and awake states arouse a new challenge of awake-to-sleep connectome prediction/translation, which remains unexplored despite its importance in the longitudinally-consistent delineation of brain functional development. Due to the data scarcity and huge differences between natural images and geometric data (e.g., brain connectome), existing methods tailored for image translation generally fail in predicting functional connectome from awake to sleep. To fill this critical gap, we unprecedentedly propose a novel reference-relation guided autoencoder with deep CCA restriction (R²AE-dCCA) for awake-to-sleep connectome prediction. Specifically, 1) A reference-autoencoder (RAE) is proposed to realize a guided generation from the source domain to the target domain. The limited paired data are thus greatly augmented by including the combinations of all the age-restricted neighboring subjects as the references, while the target-specific pattern is fully learned; 2) A relation network is then designed and embedded into RAE, which utilizes the similarity in the source domain to determine the belief-strength of the reference during prediction; 3) To ensure that the learned relation in the source domain can effectively guide the generation in the target domain, a deep CCA restriction is further employed to maintain the neighboring relation during translation; 4) New validation metrics dedicated for connectome prediction are also proposed. Experimental results showed that our proposed R²AE-dCCA produces better prediction accuracy and well maintains the modular structure of brain functional connectome in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.