Mapping individual differences in cortical architecture using multi-view representation learning

In neuroscience, understanding inter-individual differences has recently emerged as a major challenge, for which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has proven invaluable. For this, neuroscientists rely on basic methods such as univariate linear correlations between single brain features and a score that quantifies either the severity of a disease or the subject’s performance in a cognitive task. However, to this date, task-fMRI and resting-state fMRI have been exploited separately for this question, because of the lack of methods to effectively combine them. In this paper, we introduce a novel machine learning method which allows combining the activation- and connectivity-based information respectively measured through these two fMRI protocols to identify markers of individual differences in the functional organization of the brain. It combines a multi-view deep autoencoder which is designed to fuse the two fMRI modalities into a joint representation space within which a predictive model is trained to guess a scalar score that characterizes the patient. Our experimental results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to outperform competitive approaches and to produce interpretable and biologically plausible results.