Deformation-Invariant Sparse Coding for Modeling Spatial Variability of Functional Patterns in the Brain

For a given cognitive task such as language processing, the location of corresponding functional regions in the brain may vary across subjects relative to anatomy. We present a probabilistic generative model that accounts for such variability as observed in fMRI data. We relate our approach to sparse coding that estimates a basis consisting of functional regions in the brain. Individual fMRI data is represented as a weighted sum of these functional regions that undergo deformations. We demonstrate the proposed method on a language fMRI study. Our method identified activation regions that agree with known literature on language processing and established correspondences among activation regions across subjects, producing more robust group-level effects than anatomical alignment alone.