Estimating Brain Functional Connectivity from Common Subspace Mapping Between Structural and Functional Connectomes

Abstract

Understanding the connection between the brains structural connectivity and its functional connectivity is of immense interest in computational neuroscience. Although some studies have suggested that whole brain functional connectivity is shaped by the underlying structure, the rule by which anatomy constraints brain dynamics remains an open question. In this work, we introduce a computational framework that identifies a joint subspace of eigenmodes for both functional and structural connectomes. We found that a small number of those eigenmodes are sufficient to reconstruct functional connectivity from the structural connectome, thus serving as low-dimensional basis function set. We then develop an algorithm that can estimate the functional eigen spectrum in this joint space from the structural eigen spectrum. By concurrently estimating the joint eigenmodes and the functional eigen spectrum, we can reconstruct a given subjects functional connectivity from their structural connectome. We perform elaborate experiments and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm for estimating functional connectivity from the structural connectome using joint space eigenmodes gives competitive performance as compared to the existing benchmark methods with better interpretability.