Learning Active Multimodal Subspaces in the Brain.

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Here we introduce a multimodal framework to identify subspaces in the human brain that are defined by collective changes in structural and functional measures and are actively linked to demographic, biological and cognitive indicators in a population. We determine the multimodal subspaces using principles of active subspace learning (ASL) and demonstrate its application on a sample learning task (biological ageing) on a schizophrenia dataset. The proposed multimodal ASL method successfully identifies latent brain representations as subsets of brain regions and connections forming covarying subspaces in association with biological age. We show that schizophrenia is characterized by different subspace patterns compared to those in a cognitively normal brain. The multimodal features generated by projecting structural and functional MRI components onto these active subspaces perform better than several PCA-based transformations and equally well when compared to non-transformed features on the studied learning task. In essence, the proposed method successfully learns active brain subspaces associated with a specific brain condition but inferred from the brain imaging data along with the biological/cognitive traits of interest. Clinical relevance- The work introduces a novel way to create multimodal brain biomarkers based on subspaces computed in association with cognitive or biological traits of interest. These subspaces collectively covary maximally in association with a given trait and successfully retain predictive information.