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An Interpretable Representation Learning Approach for Diffusion Tensor Imaging

Published: May 25, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2505.19110v2

By: Vishwa Mohan Singh , Alberto Gaston Villagran Asiares , Luisa Sophie Schuhmacher and more

Potential Business Impact:

Makes brain scans easier for computers to understand.

Business Areas:
Image Recognition Data and Analytics, Software

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) tractography offers detailed insights into the structural connectivity of the brain, but presents challenges in effective representation and interpretation in deep learning models. In this work, we propose a novel 2D representation of DTI tractography that encodes tract-level fractional anisotropy (FA) values into a 9x9 grayscale image. This representation is processed through a Beta-Total Correlation Variational Autoencoder with a Spatial Broadcast Decoder to learn a disentangled and interpretable latent embedding. We evaluate the quality of this embedding using supervised and unsupervised representation learning strategies, including auxiliary classification, triplet loss, and SimCLR-based contrastive learning. Compared to the 1D Group deep neural network (DNN) baselines, our approach improves the F1 score in a downstream sex classification task by 15.74% and shows a better disentanglement than the 3D representation.

Country of Origin
🇩🇪 Germany

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
CV and Pattern Recognition