2009 Jimmy Chion

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Project: Intersubject mapping correlations

Multisubject analysis remains a core problem in neuroimaging due to the greater variance in cortical activity is less well-defined areas of the brain. This project correlated an ROI in one subject's brain to multiple ROIs in another brain. In our first exploration, Dr. Nathan Witthoft and I wrote MATLAB code to find, for a given voxel in subject A, the ROI in subject B which held the voxel with the highest correlation. We iterated across all voxels in subject A's ROI and found the mode of where the highest correlations were from. The simple correlations were then mapped in various ways. In our second exploration, we wrote code to map (on a voxel by voxel basis) the average correlations of an ROI in subject A to the ROIs in subject B. Our code provides a tool to help quantify the similarity or dissimilarity of ROIs in different subjects.

Background

Research

Figure 3

The problem

Functional regions in visual cortex are identified using various types of experiments. There are two common ways to identify regions. For retinotopic regions, the areas are often well-defined and have agreed upon criteria for distinguishing different areas of the visual cortex. For researchers working with category selectivity (object localizers), or finding areas keen on certain categories, the regions become much more vague. If one considers the fusiform face area (FFA), it is usually one of several areas that show functional activity when face stimuli are presented. These multiple clusters in each individual may vary greatly and it becomes a significant problem in multisubject analysis, where identifying congruent regions is critical for analysis. Selectivity ceases to be a sufficient condition for calling two regions the same.

Methods

First approach

We have subject A and some number of ROIs, including the pEBA and aEBA. We also have some scans of various kinds. In subject B, we have the same scans and ROIs as well as a large number of additional ROIs. For subject A we choose a single voxel in the pEBA and extract the fMRI data associated (timeseries, Glm betas, whatever) with it. We then search through all the data from subject B, voxel by voxel until we determine the voxel in subject B that is most correlated with the voxel from subject A. We then write down the correlation and the name of the ROI in subject B where the voxel was found. We repeat for every voxel in subject A for the pEBA. If the pEBA is 100 voxels, then at the end we should have 100 correlations and 100 ROI choices. If the pEBA is distinct from the aEBA (at least using the type of data we have collected) the majority of those ROI choices should be pEBA in subject 2. We then repeat this for every ROI in subject A. So in the end, we have what each ROI in subject A is best matched with in subject B.

the code for the first approach zip file with code

Second approach

Because our first approach only took the ROI where the maximally correlated voxel was, there was a loss of information that we had not captured but would be valuable to display. Perhaps there were outliers in our first approach that were selected as the maximum correlation. This would allow us to see the general distribution of which ROIs an ROI likes.
Our code was very similar to the code in the first approach except this time, we only selected one ROI in subject A. For each voxel in A's ROI, we find the correlation with every voxel in al ROIs in subject B (just like we did in the first approach). This produces a map of correlations from one voxel to all voxels in B. We would do this for every voxel in subject A and then averaged the maps together to get the average correlations in subject B.

Results - What you found

Retinotopic models in native space

Some text. Some analysis. Some figures.

Retinotopic models in individual subjects transformed into MNI space

Some text. Some analysis. Some figures.

Retinotopic models in group-averaged data on the MNI template brain

Some text. Some analysis. Some figures.

Retinotopic models in group-averaged data projected back into native space

Some text. Some analysis. Some figures.

Conclusions

Here is where you say what your results mean.

References - Resources and related work

References

Software

Appendix I - Code and Data

Code

zip file with code

Appendix II - Work partition

To give you a sense of the dynamic, Nathan did a lot of explaining to me, gave me some papers and the steps on how it should be coded. I coded up the first approach. He debugged it. We worked on it together and beefed it up, and then we worked on the second approach together (but it was mostly Nathan because he knew what mrVista functions to use). All in all, I learned a lot more working with Nathan than I would have by myself.