Randomized Structural Sparsity-Based Support Identification with Applications to Locating Activated or Discriminative Brain Areas: A Multicenter Reproducibility Study

In this paper, we focus on how to locate the relevant or discriminative brain regions related with external stimulus or certain mental decease, which is also called support identification, based on the neuroimaging data. The main difficulty lies in the extremely high dimensional voxel space and relatively few training samples, easily resulting in an unstable brain region discovery (or called feature selection in context of pattern recognition). When the training samples are from different centers and have between-center variations, it will be even harder to obtain a reliable and consistent result. Corresponding, we revisit our recently proposed algorithm based on stability selection and structural sparsity. It is applied to the multicenter MRI data analysis for the first time. A consistent and stable result is achieved across different centers despite the between-center data variation while many other state-of-the-art methods such as two sample t-test fail. Moreover, we have empirically showed that the performance of this algorithm is robust and insensitive to several of its key parameters. In addition, the support identification results on both functional MRI and structural MRI are interpretable and can be the potential biomarkers.