Publications by authors named "Robyn L Miller"

Understanding the relationship between cognition and intrinsic brain activity through purely data-driven approaches remains a significant challenge in neuroscience. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) offers a non-invasive method to monitor regional neural activity, providing a rich and complex spatiotemporal data structure. Deep learning has shown promise in capturing these intricate representations.

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Over the past decade and a half, dynamic functional imaging has revealed low-dimensional brain connectivity measures, identified potential common human spatial connectivity states, tracked the transition patterns of these states, and demonstrated meaningful transition alterations in disorders and over the course of development. Recently, researchers have begun to analyze these data from the perspective of dynamic systems and information theory in the hopes of understanding how these dynamics support less easily quantified processes, such as information processing, cortical hierarchy, and consciousness. Little attention has been paid to the effects of psychiatric disease on these measures, however.

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Schizophrenia (SZ) patients exhibit abnormal static and dynamic functional connectivity across various brain domains. We present a novel approach based on static and dynamic inter-network connectivity entropy (ICE), which represents the entropy of a given network's connectivity to all the other brain networks. This novel approach enables the investigation of how connectivity strength is heterogeneously distributed across available targets in both SZ patients and healthy controls.

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A common analysis approach for resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) data involves clustering windowed correlation time-series and assigning time windows to clusters (i.e., states) that can be quantified to summarize aspects of the dFNC dynamics.

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Deep learning methods are increasingly being applied to raw electroencephalogram (EEG) data. However, if these models are to be used in clinical or research contexts, methods to explain them must be developed, and if these models are to be used in research contexts, methods for combining explanations across large numbers of models must be developed to counteract the inherent randomness of existing training approaches. Model visualization-based explainability methods for EEG involve structuring a model architecture such that its extracted features can be characterized and have the potential to offer highly useful insights into the patterns that they uncover.

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Introduction: Dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) analysis of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data has yielded insights into many neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. A common dFNC analysis approach uses hard clustering methods like k-means clustering to assign samples to states that summarize network dynamics. However, hard clustering methods obscure network dynamics by assuming (1) that all samples within a cluster are equally like their assigned centroids and (2) that samples closer to one another in the data space than to their centroids are well-represented by their centroids.

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The diagnosis of schizophrenia (SZ) can be challenging due to its diverse symptom presentation. As such, many studies have sought to identify diagnostic biomarkers of SZ using explainable machine learning methods. However, the generalizability of identified biomarkers in many machine learning-based studies is highly questionable given that most studies only analyze explanations from a small number of models.

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While deep learning methods are increasingly applied in research contexts for neuropsychiatric disorder diagnosis, small dataset size limits their potential for clinical translation. Data augmentation (DA) could address this limitation, but the utility of EEG DA methods remains relatively underexplored in neuropsychiatric disorder diagnosis. In this study, we train a model for major depressive disorder diagnosis.

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While the analysis of temporal signal fluctuations and co-fluctuations has long been a fixture of blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research, the role and implications of spatial propagation within the 4D neurovascular BOLD signal has been almost entirely neglected. As part of a larger research program aimed at capturing and analyzing spatially propagative dynamics in BOLD fMRI, we report here a method that exposes large-scale functional attractors of spatial flows formulated as Markov processes defined at the voxel level. The brainwide stationary distributions of these voxel-level Markov processes represent patterns of signal accumulation toward which we find evidence that the brain exerts a probabilistic propagative undertow.

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Machine learning methods have frequently been applied to electroencephalography (EEG) data. However, while supervised EEG classification is well-developed, relatively few studies have clustered EEG, which is problematic given the potential for clustering EEG to identify novel subtypes or patterns of dynamics that could improve our understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders. There are established methods for clustering EEG using manually extracted features that reduce the richness of the feature space for clustering, but only a couple studies have sought to use deep learning-based approaches with automated feature learning to cluster EEG.

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Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) analysis has illuminated brain network interactions across many neuropsychiatric disorders. A common analysis approach involves using hard clustering methods to identify transitory states of brain activity, and in response to this, other methods have been developed to quantify the importance of specific dFNC interactions to identified states. Some of these methods involve perturbing individual features and examining the number of samples that switch states.

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While analysis of temporal signal fluctuations has long been a fixture of blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research, the role of spatially localized directional diffusion in both signal propagation and emergent large-scale functional integration remains almost entirely neglected. We are proposing an extensible framework to capture and analyze spatially localized fMRI directional signal flow dynamics. The approach is validated in a large resting-state fMRI schizophrenia study where it uncovers significant and novel relationships between hyperlocal spatial dynamics and subject diagnostic status.

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Identifying subtypes of neuropsychiatric disorders based on characteristics of their brain activity has tremendous potential to contribute to a better understanding of those disorders and to the development of new diagnostic and personalized treatment approaches. Many studies focused on neuropsychiatric disorders examine the interaction of brain networks over time using dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) extracted from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Some of these studies involve the use of either deep learning classifiers or traditional clustering approaches, but usually not both.

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Transfer learning offers a route for developing robust deep learning models on small raw electroencephalography (EEG) datasets. Nevertheless, the utility of applying representations learned from large datasets with a lower sampling rate to smaller datasets with higher sampling rates remains relatively unexplored. In this study, we transfer representations learned by a convolutional neural network on a large, publicly available sleep dataset with a 100 Hertz sampling rate to a major depressive disorder (MDD) diagnosis task at a sampling rate of 200 Hertz.

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As the field of deep learning has grown in recent years, its application to the domain of raw resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) has also increased. Relative to traditional machine learning methods or deep learning methods applied to manually engineered features, there are fewer methods for developing deep learning models on small raw EEG datasets. One potential approach for enhancing deep learning performance, in this case, is the use of transfer learning.

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Schizophrenia (SZ) is a neuropsychiatric disorder that affects millions globally. Current diagnosis of SZ is symptom-based, which poses difficulty due to the variability of symptoms across patients. To this end, many recent studies have developed deep learning methods for automated diagnosis of SZ, especially using raw EEG, which provides high temporal precision.

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As the field of deep learning has grown in recent years, its application to the domain of raw resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) has also increased. Relative to traditional machine learning methods or deep learning methods applied to extracted features, there are fewer methods for developing deep learning models on small raw EEG datasets. One potential approach for enhancing deep learning performance in this case is the use of transfer learning.

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Alzheimer's Disease (AZD) is a neurodegenerative disease for which there is now no known effective treatment. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered a precursor to AZD and affects cognitive abilities. Patients with MCI have the potential to recover cognitive health, can remain mildly cognitively impaired indefinitely or eventually progress to AZD.

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The field of neuroimaging has increasingly sought to develop artificial intelligence-based models for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorder automated diagnosis and clinical decision support. However, if these models are to be implemented in a clinical setting, transparency will be vital. Two aspects of transparency are (1) confidence estimation and (2) explainability.

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Introduction: Multimodal classification is increasingly common in electrophysiology studies. Many studies use deep learning classifiers with raw time-series data, which makes explainability difficult, and has resulted in relatively few studies applying explainability methods. This is concerning because explainability is vital to the development and implementation of clinical classifiers.

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The application of deep learning classifiers to resting-state electroencephalography (rs-EEG) data has become increasingly common. However, relative to studies using traditional machine learning methods and extracted features, deep learning methods are less explainable. A growing number of studies have presented explainability approaches for rs-EEG deep learning classifiers.

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Apolipoprotein E (APOE) polymorphic alleles are genetic factors associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk. Although previous studies have explored the link between AD genetic risk and static functional network connectivity (sFNC), to the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have evaluated the association between dynamic FNC (dFNC) and AD genetic risk. Here, we examined the link between sFNC, dFNC, and AD genetic risk with a data-driven approach.

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Dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) analysis of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data has yielded insights into many neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. A common dFNC analysis approach uses hard clustering methods like k-means clustering to assign samples to states that summarize network dynamics. However, hard clustering methods obscure network dynamics by assuming (1) that all samples within a cluster are equally like their assigned centroids and (2) that samples closer to one another in the data space than to their centroids are well-represented by their centroids.

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Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) analysis has illuminated brain network interactions across many neuropsychiatric disorders. A common analysis approach involves using hard clustering methods to identify transitory states of brain activity, and in response to this, other methods have been developed to quantify the importance of specific dFNC interactions to identified states. Some of these methods involve perturbing individual features and examining the number of samples that switch states.

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Schizophrenia (SZ) is a severe mental disorder that arises from abnormal neurodevelopment, caused by genetic and environmental factors. SZ often involves distortions in reality perception and it is widely associated with alterations in brain connectivity. In the present work, we used Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (hiPSCs)-derived neuronal cultures to study neural communicational dynamics during early development in SZ.

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