Predicting Biological Gender and Intelligence from fMRI via Dynamic Functional Connectivity

Objective: This paper explores the predictive capability of dynamic functional connectivity extracted from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain, in contrast to static connectivity used in past research. Methods: Several state-of-The-Art features extracted from static functional connectivity of the brain are employed to predict biological gender and intelligence using publicly available Human Connectome Project (HCP) database. Next, a novel tensor parallel factor (PARAFAC) decomposition model is proposed to decompose sequence of dynamic connectivity matrices into common connectivity components that are orthonormal to each other, common time-courses, and corresponding distinct subject-wise weights. The subject-wise loading of the components are employed to predict biological gender and intelligence using a random forest classifier (respectively, regressor) using 5-fold cross-validation. Results: The results demonstrate that dynamic functional connectivity can indeed classify biological gender with a high accuracy (0.94, where male identification accuracy was 0.87 and female identification accuracy was 0.97). It can also predict intelligence with less normalized mean square error (0.139 for fluid intelligence and 0.031 for fluid ability metrics) compared with other functional connectivity measures (the nearest mean square error were 0.147 and 0.037 for fluid intelligence and fluid ability metrics, respectively, using static connectivity approaches). Conclusion: Our work is an important milestone for the understanding of non-stationary behavior of hemodynamic blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in brain and how they are associated with biological gender and intelligence. Significance: The paper demonstrates that dynamic behavior of brain can contribute substantially towards forming a fingerprint of biological gender and intelligence.