title: Contextual modeling of functional MR images with conditional random fields.
abstract: This paper presents a conditional random field (CRF) approach to fuse contextual dependencies in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data for the detection of brain activation. The interactions among both activation (activated/inactive) labels and observed data of brain voxels are unified in a probabilistic framework based on the CRF, where the interaction strength can be adaptively adjusted in terms of the data similarity of neighboring sites. Compared to earlier detection methods, including statistical parametric mapping and Markov random field, the proposed method avoids the suppression of high frequency information and relaxes the strong assumption of conditional independence of observed data. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively integrates contextual constraints within the detection process and robustly detects brain activities from fMRI data.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Research Centre, School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. yang.wang@ieee.org
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Jagath C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Rajapakse
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008959:Models, Neurological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011897:Random Allocation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*