Causality-based Subject and Task Fingerprints using fMRI Time-series Data

Recently, there has been a revived interest in system neuroscience causation models due to their unique capability to unravel complex relationships in multi-scale brain networks. In this paper, our goal is to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of using a causality-based approach for fMRI fingerprinting. Specifically, we propose an innovative method that utilizes the causal dynamics activities of the brain to identify the unique cognitive patterns of individuals (e.g., subject fingerprint) and fMRI tasks (e.g., task fingerprint). The key novelty of our approach stems from the development of a two-timescale linear state-space model to extract 'spatio-temporal' (aka causal) signatures from an individual's fMRI time series data. To the best of our knowledge, we pioneer and subsequently quantify, in this paper, the concept of 'causal fingerprint.' Our method is well-separated from other fingerprint studies as we quantify fingerprints from a cause-and-effect perspective, which are then incorporated with a modal decomposition and projection method to perform subject identification and a GNN-based (Graph Neural Network) model to perform task identification. Finally, we show that the experimental results and comparisons with non-causality-based methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We visualize the obtained causal signatures and discuss their biological relevance in light of the existing understanding of brain functionalities. Collectively, our work paves the way for further studies on causal fingerprints with potential applications in both healthy controls and neurodegenerative diseases.