Multiview Diffusion Map Improves Prediction of Fluid Intelligence With Two Paradigms of FMRI Analysis

Objective: To understand the association between brain networks and behaviors of an individual, most studies build predictive models based on functional connectivity (FC) from a single dataset with linear analysis techniques. Such approaches may fail to capture the nonlinear structure of brain networks and neglect the complementary information contained in FC networks (FCNs) from multiple datasets. To address this challenging issue, we use multiview dimensionality reduction to extract a coherent low-dimensional representation of the FCNs from resting-state and emotion identification task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets.

Methods: We propose a scheme based on multiview diffusion map to extract intrinsic features while preserving the underlying geometric structure of high dimensional datasets. This method is robust to noise and small variations in the data.

Results: After validation on the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort data, the predictive model built from both resting-state and emotion identification task-based fMRI datasets outperforms the one using each individual fMRI dataset. In addition, the proposed model achieves better prediction performance than principal component analysis (PCA) and three other competing data fusion methods.

Conclusion: Our framework for combing multiple FCNs in one predictive model exhibits improved prediction performance.

Significance: To our knowledge, we demonstrate a first application of multiview diffusion map to successfully fuse different types of fMRI data for predicting fluid intelligence (gF).