Extraction of Hierarchical Functional Connectivity Components in human brain using Adversarial Learning
This work addresses the problem of reproducible biomarker extraction for brain diseases, though it appears incremental by applying adversarial learning to an existing estimation framework.
The paper tackled the challenge of robustly estimating hierarchical functional connectivity components from rsfMRI data, which are often affected by inter-scanner variations, by using adversarial learning to achieve high reproducibility compared to existing methods.
The estimation of sparse hierarchical components reflecting patterns of the brain's functional connectivity from rsfMRI data can contribute to our understanding of the brain's functional organization, and can lead to biomarkers of diseases. However, inter-scanner variations and other confounding factors pose a challenge to the robust and reproducible estimation of functionally-interpretable brain networks, and especially to reproducible biomarkers. Moreover, the brain is believed to be organized hierarchically, and hence single-scale decompositions miss this hierarchy. The paper aims to use current advancements in adversarial learning to estimate interpretable hierarchical patterns in the human brain using rsfMRI data, which are robust to "adversarial effects" such as inter-scanner variations. We write the estimation problem as a minimization problem and solve it using alternating updates. Extensive experiments on simulation and a real-world dataset show high reproducibility of the components compared to other well-known methods.