Functional connectome fingerprinting: Identifying individuals and predicting cognitive function via deep learning

The dynamic characteristics of functional network connectivity have been widely acknowledged and studied. Both shared and unique information has been shown to be present in the connectomes. However, very little has been known about whether and how this common pattern can predict the individual variability of the brain, i.e. "brain fingerprinting", which attempts to reliably identify a particular individual from a pool of subjects. In this paper, we propose to enhance the individual uniqueness based on an autoencoder network. More specifically, we rely on the hypothesis that the common neural activities shared across individuals may lessen individual discrimination. By reducing contributions from shared activities, inter-subject variability can be enhanced. Results show that that refined connectomes utilizing an autoencoder with sparse dictionary learning can successfully distinguish one individual from the remaining participants with reasonably high accuracy (up to 99:5% for the rest-rest pair). Furthermore, high-level cognitive behavior (e.g., fluid intelligence, executive function, and language comprehension) can also be better predicted using refined functional connectivity profiles. As expected, the high-order association cortices contributed more to both individual discrimination and behavior prediction. The proposed approach provides a promising way to enhance and leverage the individualized characteristics of brain networks.