NAS-optimized topology-preserving transfer learning for differentiating cortical folding patterns

Increasing evidence suggests that cortical folding patterns of human cerebral cortex manifest overt structural and functional differences. However, for interpretability, few studies leverage advanced techniques (e.g., deep learning) to investigate the difference among cortical folds, resulting in more differences yet to be extensively explored. To this end, we proposed an effective topology-preserving transfer learning framework to differentiate cortical fMRI time series extracted from cortical folds. Our framework consists of three main parts: (1) Neural architecture search (NAS), which is used to devise a well-performing network structure based on an initialized hand-designed super-graph in an image dataset; (2) Topology-preserving transfer, which takes the model searched by NAS as the source network, keeping the topological connectivity in the network unchanged, while transforming all 2D operations including convolution and pooling into 1D, therefore resulting in a topology-preserving network, named TPNAS-Net; (3) Classification and correlation analysis, which involves using the TPNAS-Net to classify 1D cortical fMRI time series for each individual brain, and performing a group difference analysis between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and healthy control (HC) and correlation analysis with clinical information (i.e., age). Extensive experiments on two ASD datasets obtain consistent results, demonstrating that the TPNAS-Net not only discriminates cortical folding patterns at high classification accuracy, but also captures subtle differences between ASD and HC (p-value = 0.042). In addition, we discover that there is a positive correlation between the classification accuracy and age in ASD (r = 0.39, p-value = 0.04). These findings together suggest that structural and functional differences in cortical folding patterns between ASD and HC may provide a potentially useful biomarker for the diagnosis of ASD.