Biology subjects

Levin-Schwartz, Y.

Publications and source records attributed to Levin-Schwartz, Y..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2019

Unraveling Diagnostic Biomarkers of Schizophrenia through Structure-Revealing Fusion of Multi-Modal Neuroimaging Data

Fusing complementary information from different modalities can lead to the discovery of more accurate diagnostic biomarkers for psychiatric disorders. However, biomarker discovery through data fusion is challenging since it requires extracting interpretable and reproducible patterns from data sets, consisting of shared/unshared patterns and of different orders. For example, multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG) signals from multiple subjects can be represented as a third-order tensor with modes: subject, time, and channel, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data may be in the form of subject by voxel matrices. Traditional data fusion methods rearrange higher-order tensors, such as EEG, as matrices to use matrix factorization-based approaches. In contrast, fusion methods based on coupled matrix and tensor factorizations (CMTF) exploit the potential multi-way structure of higher-order tensors. The CMTF approach has been shown to capture underlying patterns more accurately without imposing strong constraints on the latent neural patterns, i.e., biomarkers. In this paper, EEG, fMRI and structural MRI (sMRI) data collected during an auditory oddball task (AOD) from a group of subjects consisting of patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls, are arranged as matrices and higher-order tensors coupled along the subject mode, and jointly analyzed using structure-revealing CMTF methods (also known as advanced CMTF (ACMTF)) focusing on unique identification of underlying patterns in the presence of shared/unshared patterns. We demonstrate that joint analysis of the EEG tensor and fMRI matrix using ACMTF reveals significant and biologically meaningful components in terms of differentiating between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls while also providing spatial patterns with high resolution and improving the clustering performance compared to the analysis of only the EEG tensor. We also show that these patterns are reproducible, and study reproducibility for different model parameters. In comparison to the joint independent component analysis (jICA) data fusion approach, ACMTF provides easier interpretation of EEG data by revealing a single summary map of the topography for each component. Furthermore, fusion of sMRI data with EEG and fMRI through an ACMTF model provides structural patterns; however, we also show that when fusing data sets from multiple modalities, hence of very different nature, preprocessing plays a crucial role.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Resting-State fMRI Dynamics and Null Models: Perspectives, Sampling Variability, and Simulations

Studies of resting state functional MRI (rs-fRMI) are increasingly focused on \"dynamics\", or on those properties of brain activation that manifest and vary on timescales shorter than the scans full duration. This shift in focus has led to a flurry of interest in developing hypothesis testing frameworks and null models applicable to the dynamical setting. Thus far however, these efforts have been weakened by a number of crucial shortcomings that are outlined and discussed in this short paper. We focus here on aspects of recently proposed null models that, we argue, are poorly formulated relative to the hypotheses they are designed to test, i.e. their potential role in separating functionally relevant BOLD signal dynamics from noise or intermittent background and maintenance type processes is limited by factors that are fundamental rather than merely quantitative or parametric. In this short position paper, we emphasize that (1) serious care must be exercised in building null models for rs-fMRI dynamics from distributionally stationary univariate or multivariate timeseries, i.e. timeseries whose values are each independently drawn from one pre-specified probability distribution; and (2) measures such as kurtosis that quantify over-concentration of observed values in the far tails of some reference distribution may not be particularly suitable for capturing signal features most plausibly contributing to functionally relevant brain dynamics. Other metrics targeted, for example, at capturing the epochal temporal variation that contributes heavily to dynamic functional connectivity estimates and is and often taken as a signature of brain responsiveness to stimuli or experimental tasks, could play a more scientifically clarifying role. As we learn more about the phenomenon of functionally relevant brain dynamics and its imaging correlates, scientifically meaningful null hypotheses and well-tuned null models will naturally emerge. We also revisit the important concept of distributional stationarity, discuss how it manifests within realizations versus across multiple realizations, and provide guidance on the benefits and limitations of employing this type of stationarity in modeling the absence or functionally relevant temporal dynamics in resting state fMRI. We hope that the discussions herein are useful, and promote thoughtful consideration of these important issues.

neuroscience↗