Regionalized Infant Brain Cortical Development Based on Multi-view, High-Level fMRI Fingerprint

The human brain demonstrates higher spatial and functional heterogeneity during the first two postnatal years than any other period of life. Infant cortical developmental regionalization is fundamental for illustrating brain microstructures and reflecting functional heterogeneity during early postnatal brain development. It aims to establish smooth cortical parcellations based on the local homogeneity of brain development. Therefore, charting infant cortical developmental regionalization can reveal neurodevelopmentally meaningful cortical units and advance our understanding of early brain structural and functional development. However, existing parcellations are solely built based on either local structural properties or single-view functional connectivity (FC) patterns due to limitations in neuroimage analysis tools. These approaches fail to capture the diverse consistency of local and global functional development. Hence, we aim to construct a multi-view functional brain parcellation atlas, enabling a better understanding of infant brain functional organization during early development. Specifically, a novel fMRI fingerprint is proposed to fuse complementary regional functional connectivities. To ensure the smoothness and interpretability of the discovered map, we employ non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF) with dual graph regularization in our method. Our method was validated on the Baby Connectome Project (BCP) dataset, demonstrating superior performance compared to previous functional and structural parcellation approaches. Furthermore, we track functional development trajectory based on our brain cortical parcellation to highlight early development with high neuroanatomical and functional precision.