Motion-Invariant Variational Auto-Encoding of Brain Structural Connectomes

Mapping of human brain structural connectomes via diffusion MRI offers a unique opportunity to understand brain structural connectivity and relate it to various human traits, such as cognition. However, the presence of motion artifacts during image acquisition can compromise the accuracy of connectome reconstructions and subsequent inference results. We develop a generative model to learn low-dimensional representations of structural connectomes that are invariant to motion artifacts, so that we can link brain networks and human traits more accurately, and generate motion-adjusted connectomes. We applied the proposed model to data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and the Human Connectome Project (HCP) to investigate how our motion-invariant connectomes facilitate understanding of the brain network and its relationship with cognition. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed motion-invariant variational auto-encoder (inv-VAE) outperforms its competitors in various aspects. In particular, motion-adjusted structural connectomes are more strongly associated with a wide array of cognition-related traits than other approaches without motion adjustment. Open source code is available at https://github.com/yzhang511/inv-vae.