Longitudinal Infant Functional Connectivity Prediction via Conditional Intensive Triplet Network

Abstract

Longitudinal infant brain functional connectivity (FC) constructed from resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) has increasingly become a pivotal tool in studying the dynamics of early brain development. However, due to various reasons including high acquisition cost, strong motion artifact, and subject dropout, there has been an extreme shortage of usable longitudinal infant rs-fMRI scans to construct longitudinal FCs, which hinders comprehensive understanding and modeling of brain functional development at early ages. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel conditional intensive triplet network (CITN) for longitudinal prediction of the dynamic development of infant FC, which can traverse FCs within a long duration and predict the target FC at any specific age during infancy. Targeting at accurately modeling of the progression pattern of FC, while maintaining the individual functional uniqueness, our model effectively disentangles the intrinsically mixed age-related and identity-related information from the source FC and predicts the target FC by fusing well-disentangled identity-related information with the specific age-related information. Specifically, we introduce an intensive triplet auto-encoder for effective disentanglement of age-related and identity-related information and an identity conditional module to mix identity-related information with designated age-related information. We train the proposed model in a self-supervised way and design downstream tasks to help robustly disentangle age-related and identity-related features. Experiments on 464 longitudinal infant fMRI scans show the superior performance of the proposed method in longitudinal FC prediction in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches.