Abstract

Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality and its treatment is very expensive. Sepsis treatment is also very challenging because there is no consensus on what interventions work best and different patients respond very differently to the same treatment. Deep Reinforcement Learning methods can be used to come up with optimal policies for treatment strategies mirroring physician actions. In the healthcare scenario, the available data is mostly collected offline with no interaction with the environment, which necessitates the use of offline RL techniques. The Offline RL paradigm suffers from action distribution shifts which in turn negatively affects learning an optimal policy for the treatment. In this work, a Conservative-Q Learning (CQL) algorithm is used to mitigate this shift and its corresponding policy reaches closer to the physicians policy than conventional deep Q Learning. The policy learned could help clinicians in Intensive Care Units to make better decisions while treating septic patients and improve survival rate.

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in learning the mapping from structural connectivity (SC) to functional connectivity (FC) of the brain. The spontaneous brain activity fluctuations during the resting-state as captured by func- tional MRI (rsfMRI) contain rich non-stationary dynamics over a relatively fixed structural connectome. Among the modeling approaches, graph diffusion-based methods with single and mul- tiple diffusion kernels approximating static or dynamic functional connectivity have shown promise in predicting the FC given the SC. However, these methods are computationally expensive, not scalable, and fail to capture the complex dynamics underlying the whole process. Recently, deep learning methods such as GraphHeat networks along with graph diffusion have been shown to handle complex relational structures while preserving global information. In this paper, we propose multiple GraphHeat networks (M-GHN), a novel approach for mapping SC-FC. M- GHN enables us to model multiple heat kernel diffusion over the brain graph for approximating the complex Reaction Diffusion phenomenon. We argue that the proposed deep learning method overcomes the scalability and computational inefficiency issues but can still learn the SC-FC mapping successfully. Training and testing were done using the rsfMRI data of 100 participants from the human connectome project (HCP), and the results establish the viability of the proposed model. On the HCP dataset of 100 participants, the M-GHN achieves a high Pearson correlation

Abstract

An active area of research in cognitive science is characterizing the relationship between brain structure and the observed functional activations. Recent graph diffusion models have had great success in mapping whole-brain, resting-state dy- namics measured using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to the brain structure derived using diffusion and T1 brain imaging. Here we test the application of one such graph diffusion method called the Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) model. MKL model, formulated as a reaction-diffusion system using Wilson-Cowan equations, combines multiple diffusion ker- nels at different scales to predict functional connectome (FC) arising from a fixed structural connectome (SC). Our simulation results demonstrate that the MKL model successfully mapped the relationship between SC and FC from five different Electroen- cephalogram (EEG) bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma). We used simultaneously acquired EEG-fMRI and NODDI dataset of 17 participants. The correlation between predicted FC and ground truth FC was higher for EEG bands than for fMRI data. The prediction accuracy peaked for the alpha band, and the highest frequency band, gamma had the lowest prediction accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such end- to-end application of multiple kernel graph diffusion framework for modeling EEG data. One of the important features of MKL model is its ability to incorporate structural connectivity features into the generative model that predicts the EEG functional connectivity.

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder predominantly found in children. The current behavior-based diagnosis of ASD is arduous and requires expertise. Therefore, it is appealing to develop an accurate computer-aided tool for diagnosing ASD. Although resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) has proven to be successful in capturing the neural organization of the brain, automated detection of ASD using rsfMRI scans is a challenging task due to heterogeneity in the dataset and limited sample size. This paper proposes a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) based classification model with auto encoder pretraining for classifying ASD from Typically Developing (TD) using rsfMRI scans obtained from the ABIDE-1 dataset. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the ABIDE-1 dataset with a 10-fold cross-validation accuracy of 74.82%. Further, we use the Integrated Gradients (IG) and DeepLIFT techniques to identify the correlations between brain regions that contribute most to the classification task. Our analysis identifies the following regions, Left Lingual Gyrus, Right Insula Lobe, Right Cuneus, Right Middle Frontal Gyrus, Left Superior Temporal Gyrus to be associated with ASD. Interestingly, these regions in the brain are primarily responsible for social cognition, language, attention, decision making and visual processing, which are known to be altered in ASD.

Abstract

During healthy ageing, the brain networks undergo various topological and functional alterations. Previous studies have shown that the dedifferentiation of the functional modules could be one of the hallmarks of large-scale brain networks and alterations through the lifespan. This modular organiza- tion and alterations may be critically linked to a variety of neurodegenerative disorders and cognitive deficits encountered during ageing. In spite of accumulating evidence based on tracking static functional connectivity (FC) and modularity in characterizing dedifferentiation associated with ageing, there is a gap in understanding the brain dynamics of modular segregation and integration through the lifespan. Using the Cam-CAN dataset (young: 18-44, mean 32 years, old: 65-88, mean 75 years), we characterize the modular reorganization using dynamic measures like flexibility, to find characteristic nodes that make up the stable core and flexible periphery in the young and old age groups. In this study, we hypothesize that the nodes that exhibit higher flexibility in the older age groups will be negatively correlated with modularity since these nodes ‘compensate’ for the functional integration while ensuring that the segregation is efficient. Our results demonstrate that the regions from the Default Mode network (DMN) show a negative correlation with modularity in the old age groups. Further, nodes from Limbic, SensoriMotor (SMN) and Salience networks show a positive correlation with modularity. These networks that are responsible for higher-order cognitive functions, e.g., decision making, attentional control, cognitive flexibility are found to make up a stable core as evidenced by their low flexibility scores. We also trained various classifiers using node flexibility scores as features for the binary (young vs old) classification task. Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Gaussian kernel trained on a reduced-dimensional feature set gave the best classification results. The features (nodes) that are found to be important for classification concur with those identified through the data-driven network measures based analysis. In summary, we anticipate that these findings can help identify the regions that are responsible for the reorganization

Abstract

Estimating brain age and establishing functional biomarkers that are prescient of cognitive declines resulting from aging and dierent neurological diseases are still open research problems. Functional measures such as functional connectivity are gaining interest as potentially more subtle markers of neurodegeneration. However, brain functions are also aected by “normal” brain aging. More information is needed on how functional connectivity relates to aging, particularly in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders. Resting-state fMRI enables us to investigate functional brain networks and can potentially help us understand the processes of development as well as aging in terms of how functional connectivity (FC) matures during the early years and declines during the late years. We propose models for estimation of the chronological age of a healthy person from the resting state brain activation (rsfMRI). In this work, we utilized a dataset (N = 638, age-range 20–88) comprising rsfMRI images from the Cambridge Centre for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) repository of a healthy population. We propose an age prediction pipeline Ayu which consists of data preprocessing, feature selection, and an attention-based model for deep learning architecture for brain age assessment. We extracted features from the static functional connectivity (sFC) to predict the subject’s age and classified them into dierent age groups (young, middle, middle, and old ages). To the best of our knowledge, a classification accuracy of 72.619 % and a mean absolute error of 6.797, and an r 2 of 0.754 reported by our Ayu pipeline establish competitive benchmark results as compared to the state-of-the-art-approach. Furthermore, it is vital to identify how dierent functional regions of the brain are correlated. We also analyzed how functional regions contribute dierently across ages by applying attention-based networks and integrated gradients. We obtained well-known resting-state networks using the attention model, which maps to within the default mode network, visual network, ventral attention network, limbic network, frontoparietal network, and somatosensory network connected to aging. Our analysis of fMRI data in healthy elderly Age groups revealed that dynamic FC tends to slow down and becomes less complex and more random with increasing

Abstract

Many studies on animals, children and adults advocate for an inherent mechanism for number perception in humans and animal brains. There are some computational models for visual number perception. The on-centre off-surround Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) From Sengupta et al.(2014) accounts for some major behavioural findings regarding number perception. The RNN entails an abstract form of input and output. In our current work, we have devised a biologically interpretable method to use real images as the network's input and retrieve numerical estimation from the network's output (mean activation), resulting in an end-to-end model for enumeration of images. The model uses information from Saliency maps of images as input current for the neurons for a small duration (presentation time). The activation of the neurons changes based on the internal dynamics of the network, characterised by self …

Abstract

Can we build multi-view decoders that can decode concepts from brain recordings corresponding to any view (picture, sentence, word cloud) of stimuli? Can we build a system that can use brain recordings to automatically describe what a subject is watching using keywords or sentences? How about a system that can automatically extract important keywords from sentences that a subject is reading? Previous brain decoding efforts have focused only on single view analysis and hence cannot help us build such systems. As a first step toward building such systems, inspired by Natural Language Processing literature on multilingual and cross-lingual modeling, we propose two novel brain decoding setups: (1) multiview decoding (MVD) and (2) cross-view decoding (CVD). In MVD, the goal is to build an MV decoder that can take brain recordings for any view as input and predict the concept. In CVD, the goal is to train a model which takes brain recordings for one view as input and decodes a semantic vector representation of another view. Specifically, we study practically useful CVD tasks like image captioning, image tagging, keyword extraction, and sentence formation.

Abstract

The interference model supports a limited capacity of working memory (WM): if multiple to-be-remembered objects are presented in succession, features of later objects interfere with the recall of features of earlier objects. Feature recall of earlier objects can be strengthened with rehearsal, but this is possible for a limited amount of information. We investigated whether rehearsal can reduce interference in the recall of features of a single object. In the current study (N= 24), a circle was presented with randomly varying color, size, and location over 400 trials. Within a single trial, the stimulus appeared followed by two sequential response screens. We probed the recall of color and location of the circle, and considered two conditions (repeat, non-repeat) to investigate recall accuracy. In the repeat condition, participants recalled one of the features (either color or location) twice in a row. In the non-repeat condition, each …

Abstract

Classical Conditioning is a fundamental learning mechanism where the Ventral 14 Striatum is generally thought to be the source of inhibition to Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) 15 Dopamine neurons when a reward is expected. However, recent evidences point to a new 16 candidate in VTA GABA encoding expectation for computing the reward prediction error in the VTA. 17 In this system-level computational model, the VTA GABA signal is hypothesised to be a combination 18 of magnitude and timing computed in the Peduncolopontine and Ventral Striatum respectively. 19 This dissociation enables the model to explain recent results wherein Ventral Striatum lesions 20 affected the temporal expectation of the reward but the magnitude of the reward was intact. This 21 model also exhibits other features in classical conditioning namely, progressively decreasing firing 22 for early rewards closer to the actual reward, twin peaks of VTA dopamine during training and 23 cancellation of US dopamine after training