Persistent Feature Analysis of Multimodal Brain Networks Using Generalized Fused Lasso for EMCI Identification

Early Mild Cognitive Impairment (EMCI) involves very subtle changes in brain pathological process, and thus identification of EMCI can be challenging. By jointly analyzing cross-information among different neuroimaging data, an increased interest recently emerges in multimodal fusion to better understand clinical measurements with respect to both structural and functional connectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal brain network modeling method for EMCI identification. Specifically, we employ the structural connectivity based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), as a constraint, to guide the regression of BOLD time series from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). In addition, we introduce multiscale persistent homology features to avoid the uncertainty of regularization parameter selection. An empirical study on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database demonstrates that the proposed method effectively improves classification performance compared with several competing approaches, and reasonably yields connectivity patterns specific to different diagnostic groups.