Identification of multimodal MRI and EEG biomarkers using joint-ICA and divergence criteria

The acquisition of multiple brain imaging types for a given study is a very common practice. However these data are typically examined in separate analyses, rather than in a combined model. We propose a novel methodology to perform joint independent component analysis across image modalities, including structural MRI data, functional MRI activation data and EEG data, and to visualize the results via a joint histogram visualization technique. Evaluation of which combination of fused data is most useful is determined by using several information theoretic divergence measures. We demonstrate our method on a data set composed of functional MRI data from two tasks, structural MRI data, and EEG data collected on patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Our method provides a way to improve feature selection and even preprocessing. We show that combining data types can improve our ability to distinguish differences between groups.