fMRI Neurofeedback Learning Patterns are Predictive of Personal and Clinical Traits

We obtain a personal signature of a person's learning progress in a self-neuromodulation task, guided by functional MRI (fMRI). The signature is based on predicting the activity of the Amygdala in a second neurofeedback session, given a similar fMRI-derived brain state in the first session. The prediction is made by a deep neural network, which is trained on the entire training cohort of patients. This signal, which is indicative of a person's progress in performing the task of Amygdala modulation, is aggregated across multiple prototypical brain states and then classified by a linear classifier to various personal and clinical indications. The predictive power of the obtained signature is stronger than previous approaches for obtaining a personal signature from fMRI neurofeedback and provides an indication that a person's learning pattern may be used as a diagnostic tool. Our code has been made available, and data would be shared, subject to ethical approvals.

Learning Personal Representations from fMRIby Predicting Neurofeedback Performance

We present a deep neural network method for learning a personal representation for individuals that are performing a self neuromodulation task, guided by functional MRI (fMRI). This neurofeedback task (watch vs. regulate) provides the subjects with a continuous feedback contingent on down regulation of their Amygdala signal and the learning algorithm focuses on this region's time-course of activity. The representation is learned by a self-supervised recurrent neural network, that predicts the Amygdala activity in the next fMRI frame given recent fMRI frames and is conditioned on the learned individual representation. It is shown that the individuals' representation improves the next-frame prediction considerably. Moreover, this personal representation, learned solely from fMRI images, yields good performance in linear prediction of psychiatric traits, which is better than performing such a prediction based on clinical data and personality tests. Our code is attached as supplementary and the data would be shared subject to ethical approvals.