TY - JOUR T1 - Completion and augmentation of connectomic datasets in dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease using Virtual Patient Cohorts JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.01.18.911248 SP - 2020.01.18.911248 AU - Djouya Mohammad Arbabyazd AU - Kelly Shen AU - Zheng Wang AU - Martin Hofman-Apitius AU - The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative AU - Anthony R. McIntosh AU - Demian Battaglia AU - Viktor Jirsa Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/19/2020.01.18.911248.abstract N2 - Large neuroimaging datasets, including information about structural (SC) and functional connectivity (FC), play an increasingly important role in clinical research, where they guide the design of algorithms for automated stratification, diagnosis or prediction. A major obstacle is, however, the problem of missing features (e.g., lack of concurrent DTI SC and resting-state fMRI FC measurements for many of the subjects).We propose here to address the missing connectivity features problem by introducing strategies based on computational whole-brain network modeling. Using the ADNI dataset for proof-of-concept, we demonstrate the feasibility of virtual data completion (i.e., inferring “virtual FC” from empirical SC or “virtual SC” from empirical FC), by using self-consistent mean-field network simulations and analytic approaches. Furthermore, we use similar procedures to perform dataset augmentation, i.e., complementing the original dataset with a large number of realistic surrogate connectivity matrices. We thus show that algorithms trained on virtual SCs and/or FCs can achieve performance in the unsupervised classification of control subjects and patients comparable to when trained on actual empirical data. Furthermore, the combination of empirical with virtual data allows algorithms to learn better how to extract information relevant for discrimination, resulting ultimately in superior classification performance. ER -