Functional Connectome of the Human Brain with Total Correlation

Abstract

Recent studies proposed the use of Total Correlation to describe functional connectivity among brain regions as a multivariate alternative to conventional pair-wise measures such as correlation or mutual information. In this work we build on this idea to infer a large scale (whole brain) connectivity network based on Total Correlation and show the possibility of using this kind of networks as biomarkers of brain alterations. In particular, this work uses Correlation Explanation (CorEx) to estimate Total Correlation. First, we prove that CorEx estimates of total correlation and clustering results are trustable compared to ground truth values. Second, the inferred large scale connectivity network extracted from the more extensive open fMRI datasets is consistent with existing neuroscience studies but, interestingly, can estimate additional relations beyond pair-wise regions. And finally, we show how the connectivity graphs based on Total Correlation can also be an effective tool to aid in the discovery of brain diseases.Information theory is a valuable method to measure interactions in nonlinear systems [6], leading to its increasing use in neuroscience [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. However, although functional connectivity has already become a hot research topic