A Deep Unsupervised Learning Approach Toward MTBI Identification Using Diffusion MRI

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a growing public health problem with an estimated incidence of one million people annually in US. Neurocognitive tests have been used to both assess the patient condition and to monitor the patient progress. This work aims to directly use diffusion MR images taken shortly after injury to detect whether a patient suffers from mTBI, by incorporating deep learning techniques. To overcome the challenge due to limited training data, we describe each brain region using the bag of word representation, which specifies the distribution of representative patch patterns. We apply a convolutional auto-encoder to learn the patch-level features, from overlapping image patches extracted from the MR images. to learn features from diffusion MR images of brain using an unsupervised approach. Our experimental results show that the bag of word representation using patch level features learnt by the auto encoder provides similar performance as that using the raw patch patterns, both significantly outperform earlier work relying on the mean values of MR metrics in selected brain regions.