Identifying Autism Spectrum Disorder With Multi-Site fMRI via Low-Rank Domain Adaptation

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2020 Mar;39(3):644-655. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2019.2933160. Epub 2019 Aug 5.

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by a wide range of symptoms. Identifying biomarkers for accurate diagnosis is crucial for early intervention of ASD. While multi-site data increase sample size and statistical power, they suffer from inter-site heterogeneity. To address this issue, we propose a multi-site adaption framework via low-rank representation decomposition (maLRR) for ASD identification based on functional MRI (fMRI). The main idea is to determine a common low-rank representation for data from the multiple sites, aiming to reduce differences in data distributions. Treating one site as a target domain and the remaining sites as source domains, data from these domains are transformed (i.e., adapted) to a common space using low-rank representation. To reduce data heterogeneity between the target and source domains, data from the source domains are linearly represented in the common space by those from the target domain. We evaluated the proposed method on both synthetic and real multi-site fMRI data for ASD identification. The results suggest that our method yields superior performance over several state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder / diagnostic imaging*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*