Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) is a significant public health problem. The most troubling symptoms after mTBI are cognitive complaints. Studies show measurable differences between patients with mTBI and healthy controls with respect to tissue microstructure using diffusion MRI. However, it remains unclear which diffusion measures are the most informative with regard to cognitive functions in both the healthy state as well as after injury. In this study, we use diffusion MRI to formulate a predictive model for performance on working memory based on the most relevant MRI features. The key challenge is to identify relevant features over a large feature space with high accuracy in an efficient manner. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel improvement of the best first search approach with crossover operators inspired by genetic algorithm. Compared against other heuristic feature selection algorithms, the proposed method achieves significantly more accurate predictions and yields clinically interpretable selected features.
@article{arxiv.1908.04752,
title = {Identification of relevant diffusion MRI metrics impacting cognitive functions using a novel feature selection method},
author = {Tongda Xu and Xiyan Cai and Yao Wang and Xiuyuan Wang and Sohae Chung and Els Fieremans and Joseph Rath and Steven Flanagan and Yvonne W Lui},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04752},
year = {2019}
}