Ryohei Fukuma

Ryohei Fukuma, Kei Majima, Yoshinobu Kawahara et al.

Dynamic mode (DM) decomposition decomposes spatiotemporal signals into basic oscillatory components (DMs). DMs can improve the accuracy of neural decoding when used with the nonlinear Grassmann kernel, compared to conventional power features. However, such kernel-based machine learning algorithms have three limitations: large computational time preventing real-time application, incompatibility with non-kernel algorithms, and low interpretability. Here, we propose a mapping function corresponding to the Grassmann kernel that explicitly transforms DMs into spatial DM (sDM) features, which can be used in any machine learning algorithm. Using electrocorticographic signals recorded during various movement and visual perception tasks, the sDM features were shown to improve the decoding accuracy and computational time compared to conventional methods. Furthermore, the components of the sDM features informative for decoding showed similar characteristics to the high-$γ$ power of the signals, but with higher trial-to-trial reproducibility. The proposed sDM features enable fast, accurate, and interpretable neural decoding.

Shirin Vafaei, Ryohei Fukuma, Takufumi Yanagisawa et al.

The development of algorithms to accurately decode of neural information is a long-standing effort in the field of neuroscience. Brain decoding is typically employed by training machine learning models to map neural data onto a preestablished vector representation of stimulus features. These vectors are usually derived from image- and/or text-based feature spaces. Nonetheless, the intrinsic characteristics of these vectors might be fundamentally different than those encoded by the brain, limiting the ability of algorithms to accurately learn this mapping. To address this issue, here, we propose a representation learning framework, called brain-aligning of semantic vectors, that fine-tunes pretrained feature vectors to better align with the structure of neural representations of visual stimuli in the human brain. We trained this model with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data representing 150 visual stimulus categories; then, we performed zero-shot brain decoding on 1) fMRI, 2) magnetoencephalography (MEG), and 3) electrocorticography (ECoG) data reflecting neural representations of visual stimuli. By using fMRI-based brain-aligned vectors, the zero-shot decoding accuracy all three neuroimaging datasets increased. This finding underscores the potential of leveraging a richer array of brainderived features to increase the performance of brain decoding algorithms.