Deep Jansen-Rit Parameter Inference for Model-Driven Analysis of Brain Activity
This work addresses the problem of scalable and noise-resistant brain activity modeling for researchers in neuroscience, though it is incremental as it builds on existing model-driven approaches.
The paper tackled the challenge of accurately modeling effective connectivity in the brain from noisy EEG data by using deep-learning architectures to infer Jansen-Rit neural mass model parameters, demonstrating reliable estimation of key local parameters like synaptic gains and time constants.
Accurately modeling effective connectivity (EC) is critical for understanding how the brain processes and integrates sensory information. Yet, it remains a formidable challenge due to complex neural dynamics and noisy measurements such as those obtained from the electroencephalogram (EEG). Model-driven EC infers local (within a brain region) and global (between brain regions) EC parameters by fitting a generative model of neural activity onto experimental data. This approach offers a promising route for various applications, including investigating neurodevelopmental disorders. However, current approaches fail to scale to whole-brain analyses and are highly noise-sensitive. In this work, we employ three deep-learning architectures--a transformer, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, and a convolutional neural network and bidirectional LSTM (CNN-BiLSTM) network--for inverse modeling and compare their performance with simulation-based inference in estimating the Jansen-Rit neural mass model (JR-NMM) parameters from simulated EEG data under various noise conditions. We demonstrate a reliable estimation of key local parameters, such as synaptic gains and time constants. However, other parameters like local JR-NMM connectivity cannot be evaluated reliably from evoked-related potentials (ERP). We also conduct a sensitivity analysis to characterize the influence of JR-NMM parameters on ERP and evaluate their learnability. Our results show the feasibility of deep-learning approaches to estimate the subset of learnable JR-NMM parameters.