Unsupervised learning of the brain connectivity dynamic using residual D-net

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised learning method to learn the brain dynamics using a deep learning architecture named residual D-net. As it is often the case in medical research, in contrast to typical deep learning tasks, the size of the resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Image (rs-fMRI) datasets for training is limited. Thus, the available data should be very efficiently used to learn the complex patterns underneath the brain connectivity dynamics. To address this issue, we use residual connections to alleviate the training complexity through recurrent multi-scale representation. We conduct two classification tasks to differentiate early and late stage Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) from Normal healthy Control (NC) subjects. The experiments verify that our proposed residual D-net indeed learns the brain connectivity dynamics, leading to significantly higher classification accuracy compared to previously published techniques.