De-Individualizing fMRI Signals via Mahalanobis Whitening and Bures Geometry
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing fMRI data for brain disease diagnosis, particularly Alzheimer's, but appears incremental as it builds on existing whitening and geometry methods.
The paper tackled the problem of extracting meaningful information from fMRI signals for understanding brain function and disease by using Mahalanobis whitening and Bures geometry to de-individualize data, resulting in potential improvements in accuracy and consistency for Alzheimer's diagnosis.
Functional connectivity has been widely investigated to understand brain disease in clinical studies and imaging-based neuroscience, and analyzing changes in functional connectivity has proven to be valuable for understanding and computationally evaluating the effects on brain function caused by diseases or experimental stimuli. By using Mahalanobis data whitening prior to the use of dimensionality reduction algorithms, we are able to distill meaningful information from fMRI signals about subjects and the experimental stimuli used to prompt them. Furthermore, we offer an interpretation of Mahalanobis whitening as a two-stage de-individualization of data which is motivated by similarity as captured by the Bures distance, which is connected to quantum mechanics. These methods have potential to aid discoveries about the mechanisms that link brain function with cognition and behavior and may improve the accuracy and consistency of Alzheimer's diagnosis, especially in the preclinical stage of disease progression.