Differentiable programming for functional connectomics

Rastko Ciric, Armin W. Thomas, Oscar Esteban, Russell A. Poldrack
Proceedings of the 2nd Machine Learning for Health symposium, PMLR 193:419-455, 2022.

Abstract

Mapping the functional connectome has the potential to uncover key insights into brain organisation. However, existing workflows for functional connectomics are limited in their adaptability to new data, and principled workflow design is a challenging combinatorial problem. We introduce an analytic paradigm that implements common operations used in functional connectomics as fully differentiable processing blocks. Under this paradigm, workflow configurations exist as reparameterisations of a differentiable functional that interpolates them. The differentiable program that we ultimately envision occupies a niche midway between traditional pipelines and end-to-end neural networks, combining the glass-box tractability and domain knowledge of the former with the amenability to optimisation of the latter. In this preliminary work, we provide a proof of concept for differentiable connectomics, demonstrating the capacity of our processing blocks across three separate problem domains critically important to brain mapping. We also provide a software library to facilitate adoption. Our differentiable framework is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in functional brain parcellation, time series denoising, and covariance modelling. Taken together, our results demonstrate the promise of differentiable programming for functional connectomics.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v193-ciric22a, title = {Differentiable programming for functional connectomics}, author = {Ciric, Rastko and Thomas, Armin W. and Esteban, Oscar and Poldrack, Russell A.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Machine Learning for Health symposium}, pages = {419--455}, year = {2022}, editor = {Parziale, Antonio and Agrawal, Monica and Joshi, Shalmali and Chen, Irene Y. and Tang, Shengpu and Oala, Luis and Subbaswamy, Adarsh}, volume = {193}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {28 Nov}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v193/ciric22a/ciric22a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v193/ciric22a.html}, abstract = {Mapping the functional connectome has the potential to uncover key insights into brain organisation. However, existing workflows for functional connectomics are limited in their adaptability to new data, and principled workflow design is a challenging combinatorial problem. We introduce an analytic paradigm that implements common operations used in functional connectomics as fully differentiable processing blocks. Under this paradigm, workflow configurations exist as reparameterisations of a differentiable functional that interpolates them. The differentiable program that we ultimately envision occupies a niche midway between traditional pipelines and end-to-end neural networks, combining the glass-box tractability and domain knowledge of the former with the amenability to optimisation of the latter. In this preliminary work, we provide a proof of concept for differentiable connectomics, demonstrating the capacity of our processing blocks across three separate problem domains critically important to brain mapping. We also provide a software library to facilitate adoption. Our differentiable framework is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in functional brain parcellation, time series denoising, and covariance modelling. Taken together, our results demonstrate the promise of differentiable programming for functional connectomics.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Differentiable programming for functional connectomics %A Rastko Ciric %A Armin W. Thomas %A Oscar Esteban %A Russell A. Poldrack %B Proceedings of the 2nd Machine Learning for Health symposium %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2022 %E Antonio Parziale %E Monica Agrawal %E Shalmali Joshi %E Irene Y. Chen %E Shengpu Tang %E Luis Oala %E Adarsh Subbaswamy %F pmlr-v193-ciric22a %I PMLR %P 419--455 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v193/ciric22a.html %V 193 %X Mapping the functional connectome has the potential to uncover key insights into brain organisation. However, existing workflows for functional connectomics are limited in their adaptability to new data, and principled workflow design is a challenging combinatorial problem. We introduce an analytic paradigm that implements common operations used in functional connectomics as fully differentiable processing blocks. Under this paradigm, workflow configurations exist as reparameterisations of a differentiable functional that interpolates them. The differentiable program that we ultimately envision occupies a niche midway between traditional pipelines and end-to-end neural networks, combining the glass-box tractability and domain knowledge of the former with the amenability to optimisation of the latter. In this preliminary work, we provide a proof of concept for differentiable connectomics, demonstrating the capacity of our processing blocks across three separate problem domains critically important to brain mapping. We also provide a software library to facilitate adoption. Our differentiable framework is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in functional brain parcellation, time series denoising, and covariance modelling. Taken together, our results demonstrate the promise of differentiable programming for functional connectomics.
APA
Ciric, R., Thomas, A.W., Esteban, O. & Poldrack, R.A.. (2022). Differentiable programming for functional connectomics. Proceedings of the 2nd Machine Learning for Health symposium, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 193:419-455 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v193/ciric22a.html.

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