Accessing the topological properties of human brain functional sub-circuits in Echo State Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how embedding human brain functional sub-circuits derived from fMRI data into echo-state networks affects their performance, revealing neuro-physiological dependencies and topological influences.

Contribution

It introduces a pipeline to evaluate ESNs with various brain-inspired topologies and demonstrates the importance of neuro-physiological characteristics in optimizing network performance.

Findings

fMRI-induced sub-circuit-embedded ESNs outperform null models

performance depends on neuro-physiological features

topological properties influence ESN effectiveness

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an emerging trend in neuromorphic computing that centers around the use of brain connectomics as a blueprint for artificial neural networks. Connectomics-based neuromorphic computing has primarily focused on embedding human brain large-scale structural connectomes (SCs), as estimated from diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) modality, to echo-state networks (ESNs). A critical step in ESN embedding requires pre-determined read-in and read-out layers constructed by the induced subgraphs of the embedded reservoir. As \textit{a priori} set of functional sub-circuits are derived from functional MRI (fMRI) modality, it is unknown, till this point, whether the embedding of fMRI-induced sub-circuits/networks onto SCs is well justified from the neuro-physiological perspective and ESN performance across a variety of tasks. This paper proposes a pipeline to implement and evaluate ESNs with various embedded topologies and processing/memorization tasks. To this end, we showed that different performance optimums highly depend on the neuro-physiological characteristics of these pre-determined fMRI-induced sub-circuits. In general, fMRI-induced sub-circuit-embedded ESN outperforms simple bipartite and various null models with feed-forward properties commonly seen in MLP for different tasks and reservoir criticality conditions. We provided a thorough analysis of the topological properties of pre-determined fMRI-induced sub-circuits and highlighted their graph-theoretical properties that play significant roles in determining ESN performance.