Estimating Functional Brain Network with Low-Rank Structure via Matrix Factorization for MCI/ASD Identification

Functional brain networks (FBNs) provide a potential way for understanding the brain organizational patterns and diagnosing neurological diseases. Due to its importance, many FBN construction methods have been proposed currently, including the low-order Pearson’s correlation (PC) and sparse representation (SR), as well as the high-order functional connection (HoFC). However, most existing methods usually ignore the information of topological structures of FBN, such as low-rank structure which can reduce the noise and improve modularity to enhance the stability of networks. In this paper, we propose a novel method for improving the estimated FBNs utilizing matrix factorization (MF). More specifically, we firstly construct FBNs based on three traditional methods, including PC, SR, and HoFC. Then, we reduce the rank of these FBNs via MF model for estimating FBN with low-rank structure. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments have been conducted to identify the subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from norm controls (NCs) using the estimated FBNs. The results on Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset and Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) dataset demonstrate that the classification performances achieved by our proposed method are better than the selected baseline methods.