Dynamic Topological Data Analysis of Functional Human Brain Networks

Developing reliable methods to discriminate different transient brain states that change over time is a key neuroscientific challenge in brain imaging studies. Topological data analysis (TDA), a novel framework based on algebraic topology, can handle such a challenge. However, existing TDA has been somewhat limited to capturing the static summary of dynamically changing brain networks. We propose a novel dynamic-TDA framework that builds persistent homology over a time series of brain networks. We construct a Wasserstein distance based inference procedure to discriminate between time series of networks. The method is applied to the resting-state functional magnetic resonance images of human brain. We demonstrate that our proposed dynamic-TDA approach can distinctly discriminate between the topological patterns of male and female brain networks. MATLAB code for implementing this method is available at https://github.com/laplcebeltrami/PH-STAT.