Tractography-Based Score for Learning Effective Connectivity From Multimodal Imaging Data Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks.

Objective: Effective connectivity (EC) is the methodology for determining functional-integration among the functionally active segregated regions of the brain. By definition EC is "the causal influence exerted by one neuronal group on another" which is constrained by anatomical connectivity (AC) (axonal connections). AC is necessary for EC but does not fully determine it, because synaptic communication occurs dynamically in a context-dependent fashion. Although there is a vast emerging evidence of structure-function relationship using multimodal imaging studies, till date only a few studies have done joint modeling of the two modalities: functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). We aim to propose a unified probabilistic framework that combines information from both sources to learn EC using dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs).

Method: DBNs are probabilistic graphical temporal models that learn EC in an exploratory fashion. Specifically, we propose a novel anatomically informed (AI) score that evaluates fitness of a given connectivity structure to both DTI and fMRI data simultaneously. The AI score is employed in structure learning of DBN given the data.

Results: Experiments with synthetic-data demonstrate the face validity of structure learning with our AI score over anatomically uninformed counterpart. Moreover, real-data results are cross-validated by performing classification-experiments.

Conclusion: EC inferred on real fMRI-DTI datasets is found to be consistent with previous literature and show promising results in light of the AC present as compared to other classically used techniques such as Granger-causality.

Significance: Multimodal analyses provide a more reliable basis for differentiating brain under abnormal/diseased conditions than the single modality analysis.