Dynamic Spatial Discrimination Maps of Discriminative Activation between Different Tasks Based on Support Vector Machines

As a set of supervised pattern recognition methods, support vector machines (SVMs) have been successfully applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) field, but few studies have focused on visualizing discriminative regions of whole brain between different cognitive tasks dynamically. This paper presents a SVM-based method for visualizing dynamically discriminative activation of whole-brain voxels between two kinds of tasks without any contrast. Our method provides a series of dynamic spatial discrimination maps (DSDMs), representing the temporal evolution of discriminative brain activation during a duty cycle and describing how the discriminating information changes over the duty cycle. The proposed method was applied to investigate discriminative brain functional activations of whole brain voxels dynamically based on a hand-motor task experiment. A set of DSDMs between left hand movement and right hand movement were reached. Our results demonstrated not only where but also when the discriminative activations of whole brain voxels occurred between left hand movement and right hand movement during one duty cycle.