Integrating Multimodal and Longitudinal Neuroimaging Data with Multi-Source Network Representation Learning

Uncovering the complex network of the brain is of great interest to the field of neuroimaging. Mining from these rich datasets, scientists try to unveil the fundamental biological mechanisms in the human brain. However, neuroimaging data collected for constructing brain networks is generally costly, and thus extracting useful information from a limited sample size of brain networks is demanding. Currently, there are two common trends in neuroimaging data collection that could be exploited to gain more information: 1) multimodal data, and 2) longitudinal data. It has been shown that these two types of data provide complementary information. Nonetheless, it is challenging to learn brain network representations that can simultaneously capture network properties from multimodal as well as longitudinal datasets. Here we propose a general fusion framework for multi-source learning of brain networks – multimodal brain network fusion with longitudinal coupling (MMLC). In our framework, three layers of information are considered, including cross-sectional similarity, multimodal coupling, and longitudinal consistency. Specifically, we jointly factorize multimodal networks and construct a rotation-based constraint to couple network variance across time. We also adopt the consensus factorization as the group consistent pattern. Using two publicly available brain imaging datasets, we demonstrate that MMLC may better predict psychometric scores than some other state-of-the-art brain network representation learning algorithms. Additionally, the discovered significant brain regions are synergistic with previous literature. Our new approach may boost statistical power and sheds new light on neuroimaging network biomarkers for future psychometric prediction research by integrating longitudinal and multimodal neuroimaging data.