A great deal of current literature regarding functional neuroimaging has elucidated the relationships of neurons distributed all over the brain. Modern neuroimaging techniques, such as the functional MRI (fMRI), provide a convenient tool for people to study the correlation among different voxels as well as the spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity. In this study, we present a computational model using radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN) to predict the fMRI voxel activation with the activation of other voxels acquired at the same time. The fMRI data from a visual images stimuli presentation experiment was separated into two sets; one was used to train the model, and the other to validate the accuracy or generalizability of the model. In the visual stimuli presentation experiment, the subject did simple one-back-repetition tasks when four categories of stimuli (houses, faces, cars, and cats) were presented. Voxel sets A and B were selected from fMRI data by two different voxel selection criterion: (1) Voxel set A are those activated for any kind of object stronger than the other three objects in regions of interest (ROIs) without correction (P=0.001); (2) Voxel set B are those activated for at least one of the categories of stimuli within the ROIs (FWE correction, P=0.05). RBF-NN regression models construct the nonlinear relationship between the activation of voxels in A and B. Our test results showed that RBF-NN can capture the nonlinear relationship existing in neurons and reveal the relationship between voxel's activation from different brain regions.

Date Published: 15 March 2011
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7965, Medical Imaging 2011: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging, 796529 (15 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.876603

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7965:
Medical Imaging 2011: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging
John B. Weaver; Robert C. Molthen, Editor(s)