Learning dynamic graph embeddings for accurate detection of cognitive state changes in functional brain networks

Abstract

Mounting evidence shows that brain functions and cognitive states are dynamically changing even in the resting state rather than remaining at a single constant state. Due to the relatively small changes in BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) signals across tasks, it is difficult to detect the change of cognitive status without requiring prior knowledge of the experimental design. To address this challenge, we present a dynamic graph learning approach to generate an ensemble of subject-specific dynamic graph embeddings, which allows us to use brain networks to disentangle cognitive events more accurately than using raw BOLD signals. The backbone of our method is essentially a representation learning process for projecting BOLD signals into a latent vertex-temporal domain with the greater biological underpinning of brain activities. Specifically, the learned representation domain is jointly formed by (1) a set of harmonic waves that govern the topology of whole-brain functional connectivities and (2) a set of Fourier bases that characterize the temporal dynamics of functional changes. In this regard, our dynamic graph embeddings provide a new methodology to investigate how these self-organized functional fluctuation patterns oscillate along with the evolving cognitive status. We have evaluated our proposed method on both simulated data and working memory task-based fMRI datasets, where our dynamic graph embeddings achieve higher accuracy in detecting multiple cognitive states than other state-of-the-art methods.