A Novel Information Theoretic and Bayesian Approach for fMRI data Analysis

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a powerful technique for studying the working of the human brain. The overall goal of the project is to devlop a novel method for the analysis of fMRI data in order to discover the activation of a network of regions involving most likely the hippocampus, parietal cortex and cerebellum as a person is navigating in a virtual environment. Spatially sensitive voxels are extracted by selecting voxels that have high mutual information. Each of these extracted voxels is then used to create a response curve for the stimulus of interest, in this case spatial location. Following the voxel extraction stage, the set of extracted voxel time series would be treated as a population and used to predict the location of the subject at any randomly selected time in the experiment. The population of voxels essentially “votes ” with their current activity. The approach used for prediction is the Bayesian reconstruction method. The ability to predict the location of a subject in the virtual environment based on brain signals will be useful in developing a physiological understanding of spatial cognition in virtual environments