Disjoint subspaces for common and distinct component analysis: Application to the fusion of multi-task FMRI data.

Background: Data-driven methods such as independent component analysis (ICA) makes very few assumptions on the data and the relationships of multiple datasets, and hence, are attractive for the fusion of medical imaging data. Two important extensions of ICA for multiset fusion are the joint ICA (jICA) and the multiset canonical correlation analysis and joint ICA (MCCA-jICA) techniques. Both approaches assume identical mixing matrices, emphasizing components that are common across the multiple datasets. However, in general, one would expect to have components that are both common across the datasets and distinct to each dataset.

New Method: We propose a general framework, disjoint subspace analysis using ICA (DS-ICA), which identifies and extracts not only the common but also the distinct components across multiple datasets. A key component of the method is the identification of these subspaces and their separation before subsequent analyses, which helps establish better model match and provides flexibility in algorithm and order choice.

Comparison: We compare DS-ICA with jICA and MCCA-jICA through both simulations and application to multiset functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task data collected from healthy controls as well as patients with schizophrenia.

Results: The results show DS-ICA estimates more components discriminative between healthy controls and patients than jICA and MCCA-jICA, and with higher discriminatory power showing activation differences in meaningful regions. When applied to a classification framework, components estimated by DS-ICA results in higher classification performance for different dataset combinations than the other two methods.

Conclusion: These results demonstrate that DS-ICA is an effective method for fusion of multiple datasets.