A Riemannian Framework for Detecting Stimulus-Relevant Fiber Pathways

Functional MRI based on blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast is well established as a neuroimaging technique for detecting neural activity in the cortex of the human brain. Recent studies have shown that variations of BOLD signals in white matter are also related to neural activities both in resting state and under functional loading. We develop a comprehensive framework of detecting task-specific fiber pathways. We not only study fiber tracts as open curves with different physical features (shape, scale, orientation and position), but also incorporate the BOLD signals associated with them to find stimulus-relevant pathways. Specifically, we propose a novel Riemannian metric, which is a weighted sum of distances in product space of shapes and functions. This metric provides both a cost function for registration and a proper distance for comparison. Experimental results on real data have shown that we can cluster fiber pathways correctly by evaluating correlations between BOLD signals and stimuli, temporal variations and power spectra of them.