# Deep Variational Lesion-Deficit Mapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5298/) (2014)
- [An Intriguing Failing of Convolutional Neural Networks and the CoordConv Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03247/) (2018)
- [Toward Controlled Generation of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00955/) (2017)
- [Very Deep VAEs Generalize Autoregressive Models and Can Outperform Them on Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10650/) (2020)
- [Autoencoders for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03271/) (2020)
- [Equitable modelling of brain imaging by counterfactual augmentation with morphologically constrained 3D deep generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14923/) (2021)
- [NeuroQuery: comprehensive meta-analysis of human brain mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09261/) (2020)
- [Bayesian Volumetric Autoregressive generative models for better semisupervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11559/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The minimal computational substrate of fluid intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07039/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Causal mapping of the functional organisation of the human brain requires evidence of textitnecessity available at adequate scale only from pathological lesions of natural origin. This demands inferential models with sufficient flexibility to capture both the observable distribution of pathological damage and the unobserved distribution of the neural substrate. Current model frameworks -- both mass-univariate and multivariate -- either ignore distributed lesion-deficit relations or do not model them explicitly, relying on featurization incidental to a predictive task. Here we initiate the application of deep generative neural network architectures to the task of lesion-deficit inference, formulating it as the estimation of an expressive hierarchical model of the joint lesion and deficit distributions conditioned on a latent neural substrate. We implement such deep lesion deficit inference with variational convolutional volumetric auto-encoders. We introduce a comprehensive framework for lesion-deficit model comparison, incorporating diverse candidate substrates, forms of substrate interactions, sample sizes, noise corruption, and population heterogeneity. Drawing on 5500 volume images of ischaemic stroke, we show that our model outperforms established methods by a substantial margin across all simulation scenarios, including comparatively small-scale and noisy data regimes. Our analysis justifies the widespread adoption of this approach, for which we provide an open source implementation: https://github.com/guilherme-pombo/vaelesiondeficit