Age Related Functional Connectivity Signature Extraction Using Energy-Based Machine Learning Techniques

The study of brain connectivity plays an important role in understanding the functional organizations of the brain. It also helps to identify connectivity signatures that can be used for evaluating neural disorders and monitoring treatment efficacy. In this work, age-related changes in brain connectivity are studied to obtain aging signatures based on various modeling techniques. These include an energy-based machine learning technique to identify brain network interaction differences between two age groups with a large (30 years) age gap between them. Disconnectivity graphs and activation maps of the seven prominent resting-state networks (RSN) were obtained from functional MRI data of old and young adult subjects. Two-sample -tests were performed on the local minimums with Bonferroni correction to control the family-wise error rate. These local minimums are connectivity states showing not only which brain regions but also how strong they are working together. They work as aging signatures that can be used to differentiate young and old groups. We found that the attention network's connectivity signature is a state with all the regions working together and young subjects have a stronger average connectivity among these regions. We have also found a common pattern between young and old subjects where the left and right brain regions of the frontal network are sometimes working separately instead of together. In summary, in this work, we combined machine learning and statistical approaches to extract connectivity signatures, which can be utilized to distinguish aging brains and monitor possible treatment efficacy.