Spatio-temporal tensor analysis for whole-brain fMRI classification

Owing to prominence as a research and diagnostic tool in human brain mapping, whole-brain fMRI image analysis has been the focus of intense investigation. Conventionally, input fMRI brain images are converted into vectors or matrices and adapted in kernel based classifiers. fMRI data, however, are inherently coupled with sophisticated spatio-temporal tensor structure (i.e., 3D space x time). Valuable structural information will be lost if the tensors are converted into vectors. Furthermore, time series fMRI data are noisy, involving time shift and low temporal resolution. To address these analytic challenges, more compact and discriminative representations for kernel modeling are needed. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal tensor kernel (STTK) approach for whole-brain fMRI image analysis. Specifically, we design a volumetric time series extraction approach to model the temporal data, and propose a spatio-temporal tensor based factorization for feature extraction. We further leverage the tensor structure to encode prior knowledge in the kernel. Extensive experiments using real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively boosts the fMRI classification performance in diverse brain disorders (i.e., Alzheimer's disease, ADHD and HIV).