Adaptive constrained independent vector analysis: An effective solution for analysis of large-scale medical imaging data

There is a growing need for flexible methods for the analysis of large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data for the estimation of global signatures that summarize the population while preserving individual-specific traits. Independent vector analysis (IVA) is a data-driven method that jointly estimates global spatio-temporal patterns from multi-subject fMRI data, and effectively preserves subject variability. However, as we show, IVA performance is negatively affected when the number of datasets and components increases especially when there is low component correlation across the datasets. We study the problem and its relationship with respect to correlation across the datasets, and propose an effective method for addressing the issue by incorporating reference information of the estimation patterns into the formulation, as a guidance in high dimensional scenarios. Constrained IVA (cIVA) provides an efficient framework for incorporating references, however its performance depends on a user-defined constraint parameter, which enforces the association between the reference signals and estimation patterns to a fixed level. We propose adaptive cIVA (acIVA) that tunes the constraint parameter to allow flexible associations between the references and estimation patterns, and enables incorporating multiple reference signals, without enforcing inaccurate conditions. Our results indicate that acIVA can reliably estimate high-dimensional multivariate sources from large-scale simulated datasets, when compared with standard IVA. It also successfully extracts meaningful functional networks from a large-scale fMRI dataset for which standard IVA did not converge. The method also efficiently captures subject-specific information, which is demonstrated through observed gender differences in spectral power, higher spectral power in males at low frequencies and in females at high frequencies, within the motor, attention, visual and default mode networks.