Preserving Human Large-Scale Brain Connectivity Fingerprint Identifiability with Random Projections

The complex etiology of various neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric disorders, especially at the individual level, has posed unmatched challenges to the advancement of personalized medicine. Recent technical advancements in functional magnetic resonance imaging has enabled researchers to map brain large-scale connectivity at an unprecedented level of subject precision. Nonetheless, along with the early dawn of promises in personalized medicine using various neuroimaging modalities rose the challenge of clinical utility of brain connectomics (e.g., functional connectomes). Besides many established challenges of functional connectome utility such as edge reliability, there exists an easily overlooked challenge that does not get the same level of attention: computationality of functional connectome. To improve clinical utility of functional connectomics, we propose a random projection method that would preserve a practically similar level of subject identifiability while sampling and retaining only a proportion of functional edges in subjects’ functional connectome. Our work pave a way towards computational improvements, hence clinical utility, of functional connectomes while not compromising the integrity of biomarkers learnt from whole-brain large-scale functional connectivity imaging modality.