A region-of-interest-reweight 3D convolutional neural network for the analytics of brain information processing

Abstract

We study how human brains activate to process input information and execute necessary cognitive tasks. Understanding the process is crucial in improving our diagnostic and treatment of different neurological disorders. Given functional MRI images recorded when human subjects execute tasks with different levels of information uncertainty, we need to identify the similarity and difference between brain activities at different regions of interest (ROIs), and thus gain insights into the underlying mechanism. To achieve this goal, we propose a new ROI-reweight 3D convolutional neural network (CNN). Our CNN not only learns to classify the task-evoked fMRIs with a high accuracy, but also locates crucial ROIs based on a reweight layer. Our findings reveal several brain regions to be crucial in differentiating brain activity patterns facing tasks of different uncertainty levels.