Longitudinal Correlation Analysis for Decoding Multi-Modal Brain Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces Longitudinal Correlation Analysis (LCA), a novel method for analyzing multi-modal neuroimaging data over time to understand brain development, successfully revealing coupled structural and microstructural changes during adolescence.

Contribution

LCA is a new approach that couples multi-modal brain data longitudinally using autoencoders and self-supervised learning, outperforming existing methods by capturing complex developmental patterns.

Findings

Unveiled coupled macrostructural and microstructural brain development.

Successfully applied to longitudinal MRI data of 679 youths.

Replicated findings on raw 3D image volumes.

Abstract

Starting from childhood, the human brain restructures and rewires throughout life. Characterizing such complex brain development requires effective analysis of longitudinal and multi-modal neuroimaging data. Here, we propose such an analysis approach named Longitudinal Correlation Analysis (LCA). LCA couples the data of two modalities by first reducing the input from each modality to a latent representation based on autoencoders. A self-supervised strategy then relates the two latent spaces by jointly disentangling two directions, one in each space, such that the longitudinal changes in latent representations along those directions are maximally correlated between modalities. We applied LCA to analyze the longitudinal T1-weighted and diffusion-weighted MRIs of 679 youths from the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence. Unlike existing approaches that focus on either cross-sectional or single-modal modeling, LCA successfully unraveled coupled macrostructural and microstructural brain development from morphological and diffusivity features extracted from the data. A retesting of LCA on raw 3D image volumes of those subjects successfully replicated the findings from the feature-based analysis. Lastly, the developmental effects revealed by LCA were inline with the current understanding of maturational patterns of the adolescent brain.