Functional brain mapping by methods of evolutionary natural selection

Abstract

We used genetic algorithms to detect active voxels in the human brain imaged using functional magnetic resonance images. The method that we called EVOX deploys multivoxel pattern analysis to find the fitness of most active voxels. The fitness function is a classifier that works in a leave-one-run-out cross-validation. In each generation, the fitness value is calculated as the average performance over all cross-validation folds. Experimental results using functional magnetic resonance images collected while humans (subjects) were responding to attention visual stimuli showed certain situations that EVOX has could be useful compared to univariate ANOVA (analysis of variance) and searchlight methods. EVOX is an effective multivoxel evolutionary tool that can be used to tell where in the brain patterns responding to stimuli are. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.