Improved data quality and statistical power of trial-level event-related potentials with Bayesian random-shift Gaussian processes.

Studies of cognitive processes via electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings often analyze group-level event-related potentials (ERPs) averaged over multiple subjects and trials. This averaging procedure can obscure scientifically relevant variability across subjects and trials, but has been necessary due to the difficulties posed by inference of trial-level ERPs. We introduce the Bayesian Random Phase-Amplitude Gaussian Process (RPAGP) model, for inference of trial-level amplitude, latency, and ERP waveforms. We apply RPAGP to data from a study of ERP responses to emotionally arousing images. The model estimates of trial-specific signals are shown to greatly improve statistical power in detecting significant differences in experimental conditions compared to existing methods. Our results suggest that replacing the observed data with the de-noised RPAGP predictions can potentially improve the sensitivity and accuracy of many of the existing ERP analysis pipelines.

Diminished Adaptation, Satisfaction, and Neural Responses to Advantageous Social Signals in Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa.

BACKGROUND: Development and recurrence of 2 eating disorders (EDs), anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, are frequently associated with environmental stressors. Neurobehavioral responses to social learning signals were evaluated in both EDs. METHODS: Women with anorexia nervosa (n = 25), women with bulimia nervosa (n = 30), or healthy comparison women (n = 38) played a neuroeconomic game in which the norm shifted, generating social learning signals (norm prediction errors [NPEs]) during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. A Bayesian logistic regression model examined how the probability of offer acceptance depended on cohort, block, and NPEs. Rejection rates, emotion ratings, and neural responses to NPEs were compared across groups. RESULTS: Relative to the comparison group, both ED cohorts showed less adaptation (p = .028, ηp2 = 0.060), and advantageous signals (positive NPEs) led to higher rejection rates (p = .014, ηp2 = 0.077) and less positive emotion ratings (p = .004, ηp2 = 0.111). Advantageous signals increased neural activations in the orbitofrontal cortex for the comparison group but not for women with anorexia nervosa (p = .018, d = 0.655) or bulimia nervosa (p = .043, d = 0.527). More severe ED symptoms were associated with decreased activation of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex for advantageous signals. CONCLUSIONS: Diminished neural processing of advantageous social signals and impaired norm adaptation were observed in both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, while no differences were found for disadvantageous social signals. Development of neurocognitive interventions to increase responsivity to advantageous social signals could augment current treatments, potentially leading to improved clinical outcomes for EDs.

Noradrenaline tracks emotional modulation of attention in human amygdala.

The noradrenaline (NA) system is one of the brain's major neuromodulatory systems; it originates in a small midbrain nucleus, the locus coeruleus (LC), and projects widely throughout the brain.1,2 The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention3,4 and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions.5,6,7 Yet our understanding of its role in health and disease has been impeded by a lack of direct recordings in humans. Here, we address this problem by showing that electrochemical estimates of sub-second NA dynamics can be obtained using clinical depth electrodes implanted for epilepsy monitoring. We made these recordings in the amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient structure that supports emotional processing8,9 and receives dense LC-NA projections,10 while patients (n = 3) performed a visual affective oddball task. The task was designed to induce different cognitive states, with the oddball stimuli involving emotionally evocative images,11 which varied in terms of arousal (low versus high) and valence (negative versus positive). Consistent with theory, the NA estimates tracked the emotional modulation of attention, with a stronger oddball response in a high-arousal state. Parallel estimates of pupil dilation, a common behavioral proxy for LC-NA activity,12 supported a hypothesis that pupil-NA coupling changes with cognitive state,13,14 with the pupil and NA estimates being positively correlated for oddball stimuli in a high-arousal but not a low-arousal state. Our study provides proof of concept that neuromodulator monitoring is now possible using depth electrodes in standard clinical use.

A Bayesian joint model for compositional mediation effect selection in microbiome data.

Analyzing multivariate count data generated by high-throughput sequencing technology in microbiome research studies is challenging due to the high-dimensional and compositional structure of the data and overdispersion. In practice, researchers are often interested in investigating how the microbiome may mediate the relation between an assigned treatment and an observed phenotypic response. Existing approaches designed for compositional mediation analysis are unable to simultaneously determine the presence of direct effects, relative indirect effects, and overall indirect effects, while quantifying their uncertainty. We propose a formulation of a Bayesian joint model for compositional data that allows for the identification, estimation, and uncertainty quantification of various causal estimands in high-dimensional mediation analysis. We conduct simulation studies and compare our method's mediation effects selection performance with existing methods. Finally, we apply our method to a benchmark data set investigating the sub-therapeutic antibiotic treatment effect on body weight in early-life mice.

Bayesian feature selection for radiomics using reliability metrics.

Introduction: Imaging of tumors is a standard step in diagnosing cancer and making subsequent treatment decisions. The field of radiomics aims to develop imaging based biomarkers using methods rooted in artificial intelligence applied to medical imaging. However, a challenging aspect of developing predictive models for clinical use is that many quantitative features derived from image data exhibit instability or lack of reproducibility across different imaging systems or image-processing pipelines. Methods: To address this challenge, we propose a Bayesian sparse modeling approach for image classification based on radiomic features, where the inclusion of more reliable features is favored via a probit prior formulation. Results: We verify through simulation studies that this approach can improve feature selection and prediction given correct prior information. Finally, we illustrate the method with an application to the classification of head and neck cancer patients by human papillomavirus status, using as our prior information a reliability metric quantifying feature stability across different imaging systems.

Bayesian continuous-time hidden Markov models with covariate selection for intensive longitudinal data with measurement error.

Intensive longitudinal data collected with ecological momentary assessment methods capture information on participants' behaviors, feelings, and environment in near real-time. While these methods can reduce recall biases typically present in survey data, they may still suffer from other biases commonly found in self-reported data (e.g., measurement error and social desirability bias). To accommodate potential biases, we develop a Bayesian hidden Markov model to simultaneously identify risk factors for subjects transitioning between discrete latent states as well as risk factors potentially associated with them misreporting their true behaviors. We use simulated data to demonstrate how ignoring potential measurement error can negatively affect variable selection performance and estimation accuracy. We apply our proposed model to smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment data collected within a randomized controlled trial that evaluated the impact of incentivizing abstinence from cigarette smoking among socioeconomically disadvantaged adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Bayesian inference for stationary points in Gaussian process regression models for event-related potentials analysis.

Stationary points embedded in the derivatives are often critical for a model to be interpretable and may be considered as key features of interest in many applications. We propose a semiparametric Bayesian model to efficiently infer the locations of stationary points of a nonparametric function, which also produces an estimate of the function. We use Gaussian processes as a flexible prior for the underlying function and impose derivative constraints to control the function's shape via conditioning. We develop an inferential strategy that intentionally restricts estimation to the case of at least one stationary point, bypassing possible mis-specifications in the number of stationary points and avoiding the varying dimension problem that often brings in computational complexity. We illustrate the proposed methods using simulations and then apply the method to the estimation of event-related potentials derived from electroencephalography (EEG) signals. We show how the proposed method automatically identifies characteristic components and their latencies at the individual level, which avoids the excessive averaging across subjects that is routinely done in the field to obtain smooth curves. By applying this approach to EEG data collected from younger and older adults during a speech perception task, we are able to demonstrate how the time course of speech perception processes changes with age.

BAYESIAN NON-HOMOGENEOUS HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL WITH VARIABLE SELECTION FOR INVESTIGATING DRIVERS OF SEIZURE RISK CYCLING.

A major issue in the clinical management of epilepsy is the unpredictability of seizures. Yet, traditional approaches to seizure forecasting and risk assessment in epilepsy rely heavily on raw seizure frequencies, which are a stochastic measurement of seizure risk. We consider a Bayesian non-homogeneous hidden Markov model for unsupervised clustering of zero-inflated seizure count data. The proposed model allows for a probabilistic estimate of the sequence of seizure risk states at the individual level. It also offers significant improvement over prior approaches by incorporating a variable selection prior for the identification of clinical covariates that drive seizure risk changes and accommodating highly granular data. For inference, we implement an efficient sampler that employs stochastic search and data augmentation techniques. We evaluate model performance on simulated seizure count data. We then demonstrate the clinical utility of the proposed model by analyzing daily seizure count data from 133 patients with Dravet syndrome collected through the Seizure Tracker™ system, a patient-reported electronic seizure diary. We report on the dynamics of seizure risk cycling, including validation of several known pharmacologic relationships. We also uncover novel findings characterizing the presence and volatility of risk states in Dravet syndrome, which may directly inform counseling to reduce the unpredictability of seizures for patients with this devastating cause of epilepsy.

A Bayesian switching linear dynamical system for estimating seizure chronotypes.

Epilepsy is a disorder characterized by paroxysmal transitions between multistable states. Dynamical systems have been useful for modeling the paroxysmal nature of seizures. At the same time, intracranial electroencephalography (EEG) recordings have recently discovered that an electrographic measure of epileptogenicity, interictal epileptiform activity, exhibits cycling patterns ranging from ultradian to multidien rhythmicity, with seizures phase-locked to specific phases of these latent cycles. However, many mechanistic questions about seizure cycles remain unanswered. Here, we provide a principled approach to recast the modeling of seizure chronotypes within a statistical dynamical systems framework by developing a Bayesian switching linear dynamical system (SLDS) with variable selection to estimate latent seizure cycles. We propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that employs particle Gibbs with ancestral sampling to estimate latent cycles in epilepsy and apply unsupervised learning on spectral features of latent cycles to uncover clusters in cycling tendency. We analyze the largest database of patient-reported seizures in the world to comprehensively characterize multidien cycling patterns among 1,012 people with epilepsy, spanning from infancy to older adulthood. Our work advances knowledge of cycling in epilepsy by investigating how multidien seizure cycles vary in people with epilepsy, while demonstrating an application of an SLDS to frame seizure cycling within a nonlinear dynamical systems framework. It also lays the groundwork for future studies to pursue data-driven hypothesis generation regarding the mechanistic drivers of seizure cycles.

Seizure count forecasting to aid diagnostic testing in epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: Epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU) admissions are critical for presurgical evaluation of drug-resistant epilepsy but may be nondiagnostic if an insufficient number of seizures are recorded. Seizure forecasting algorithms have shown promise for estimating the likelihood of seizures as a binary event in individual patients, but methods to predict how many seizures will occur remain elusive. Such methods could increase the diagnostic yield of EMU admissions and help patients mitigate seizure-related morbidity. Here, we evaluated the performance of a state-space method that uses prior seizure count data to predict future counts. METHODS: A Bayesian negative-binomial dynamic linear model (DLM) was developed to forecast daily electrographic seizure counts in 19 patients implanted with a responsive neurostimulation (RNS) device. Holdout validation was used to evaluate performance in predicting the number of electrographic seizures for forecast horizons ranging 1-7 days ahead. RESULTS: One-day-ahead prediction of the number of electrographic seizures using a negative-binomial DLM resulted in improvement over chance in 73.1% of time segments compared to a random chance forecaster and remained >50% for forecast horizons of up to 7 days. Superior performance (mean error = .99) was obtained in predicting the number of electrographic seizures in the next day compared to three traditional methods for count forecasting (integer-valued generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model or INGARCH, 1.10; Croston, 1.06; generalized linear autoregressive moving average model or GLARMA, 2.00). Number of electrographic seizures in the preceding day and laterality of electrographic pattern detections had highest predictive value, with greater number of electrographic seizures and RNS magnet swipes in the preceding day associated with a higher number of electrographic seizures the next day. SIGNIFICANCE: This study demonstrates that DLMs can predict the number of electrographic seizures a patient will experience days in advance with above chance accuracy. This study represents an important step toward the translation of seizure forecasting methods into the optimization of EMU admissions.

Bayesian graphical models for modern biological applications.

Graphical models are powerful tools that are regularly used to investigate complex dependence structures in high-throughput biomedical datasets. They allow for holistic, systems-level view of the various biological processes, for intuitive and rigorous understanding and interpretations. In the context of large networks, Bayesian approaches are particularly suitable because it encourages sparsity of the graphs, incorporate prior information, and most importantly account for uncertainty in the graph structure. These features are particularly important in applications with limited sample size, including genomics and imaging studies. In this paper, we review several recently developed techniques for the analysis of large networks under non-standard settings, including but not limited to, multiple graphs for data observed from multiple related subgroups, graphical regression approaches used for the analysis of networks that change with covariates, and other complex sampling and structural settings. We also illustrate the practical utility of some of these methods using examples in cancer genomics and neuroimaging.

Effective connectivity between resting-state networks in depression.

RATIONALE: Although depression has been widely researched, findings characterizing how brain regions influence each other remains scarce, yet this is critical for research on antidepressant treatments and individual responses to particular treatments. OBJECTIVES: To identify pre-treatment resting state effective connectivity (rsEC) patterns in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and explore their relationship with treatment response. METHODS: Thirty-four drug-free MDD patients had an MRI scan and were subsequently treated for 6 weeks with an SSRI escitalopram 10 mg daily; the response was defined as ≥50% decrease in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) score. RESULTS: rsEC networks in default mode, central executive, and salience networks were identified for patients with depression. Exploratory analyses indicated higher connectivity strength related to baseline depression severity and response to treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Preliminary analyses revealed widespread dysfunction of rsEC in depression. Functional rsEC may be useful as a predictive tool for antidepressant treatment response. A primary limitation of the current study was the small size; however, the group was carefully chosen, well-characterized, and included only medication-free patients. Further research in large samples of placebo-controlled studies would be required to confirm the results.

Latent Network Estimation and Variable Selection for Compositional Data Via Variational EM.

Network estimation and variable selection have been extensively studied in the statistical literature, but only recently have those two challenges been addressed simultaneously. In this article, we seek to develop a novel method to simultaneously estimate network interactions and associations to relevant covariates for count data, and specifically for compositional data, which have a fixed sum constraint. We use a hierarchical Bayesian model with latent layers and employ spike-and-slab priors for both edge and covariate selection. For posterior inference, we develop a novel variational inference scheme with an expectation-maximization step, to enable efficient estimation. Through simulation studies, we demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods in its accuracy of network recovery. We show the practical utility of our model via an application to microbiome data. The human microbiome has been shown to contribute too many of the functions of the human body, and also to be linked with a number of diseases. In our application, we seek to better understand the interaction between microbes and relevant covariates, as well as the interaction of microbes with each other. We call our algorithm simultaneous inference for networks and covariates and provide a Python implementation, which is available online.

Effective connectivity in the default mode network after paediatric traumatic brain injury.

Children who experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are at elevated risk for a range of negative cognitive and neuropsychological outcomes. Identifying which children are at greatest risk for negative outcomes can be difficult due to the heterogeneity of TBI. To address this barrier, the current study applied a novel method of characterizing brain connectivity networks, Bayesian multi-subject vector autoregressive modelling (BVAR-connect), which used white matter integrity as priors to evaluate effective connectivity-the time-dependent relationship in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity between two brain regions-within the default mode network (DMN). In a prospective longitudinal study, children ages 8-15 years with mild to severe TBI underwent diffusion tensor imaging and resting state fMRI 7 weeks after injury; post-concussion and anxiety symptoms were assessed 7 months after injury. The goals of this study were to (1) characterize differences in positive effective connectivity of resting-state DMN circuitry between healthy controls and children with TBI, (2) determine if severity of TBI was associated with differences in DMN connectivity and (3) evaluate whether patterns of DMN effective connectivity predicted persistent post-concussion symptoms and anxiety. Healthy controls had unique positive connectivity that mostly emerged from the inferior temporal lobes. In contrast, children with TBI had unique effective connectivity among orbitofrontal and parietal regions. These positive orbitofrontal-parietal DMN effective connectivity patterns also differed by TBI severity and were associated with persisting behavioural outcomes. Effective connectivity may be a sensitive neuroimaging marker of TBI severity as well as a predictor of chronic post-concussion symptoms and anxiety.

Evidence of state-dependence in the effectiveness of responsive neurostimulation for seizure modulation.

BACKGROUND: An implanted device for brain-responsive neurostimulation (RNS® System) is approved as an effective treatment to reduce seizures in adults with medically-refractory focal epilepsy. Clinical trials of the RNS System demonstrate population-level reduction in average seizure frequency, but therapeutic response is highly variable. HYPOTHESIS: Recent evidence links seizures to cyclical fluctuations in underlying risk. We tested the hypothesis that effectiveness of responsive neurostimulation varies based on current state within cyclical risk fluctuations. METHODS: We analyzed retrospective data from 25 adults with medically-refractory focal epilepsy implanted with the RNS System. Chronic electrocorticography was used to record electrographic seizures, and hidden Markov models decoded seizures into fluctuations in underlying risk. State-dependent associations of RNS System stimulation parameters with changes in risk were estimated. RESULTS: Higher charge density was associated with improved outcomes, both for remaining in a low seizure risk state and for transitioning from a high to a low seizure risk state. The effect of stimulation frequency depended on initial seizure risk state: when starting in a low risk state, higher stimulation frequencies were associated with remaining in a low risk state, but when starting in a high risk state, lower stimulation frequencies were associated with transition to a low risk state. Findings were consistent across bipolar and monopolar stimulation configurations. CONCLUSION: The impact of RNS on seizure frequency exhibits state-dependence, such that stimulation parameters which are effective in one seizure risk state may not be effective in another. These findings represent conceptual advances in understanding the therapeutic mechanism of RNS, and directly inform current practices of RNS tuning and the development of next-generation neurostimulation systems.

Two-group Poisson-Dirichlet mixtures for multiple testing.

The simultaneous testing of multiple hypotheses is common to the analysis of high-dimensional data sets. The two-group model, first proposed by Efron, identifies significant comparisons by allocating observations to a mixture of an empirical null and an alternative distribution. In the Bayesian nonparametrics literature, many approaches have suggested using mixtures of Dirichlet Processes in the two-group model framework. Here, we investigate employing mixtures of two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet Processes instead, and show how they provide a more flexible and effective tool for large-scale hypothesis testing. Our model further employs nonlocal prior densities to allow separation between the two mixture components. We obtain a closed-form expression for the exchangeable partition probability function of the two-group model, which leads to a straightforward Markov Chain Monte Carlo implementation. We compare the performance of our method for large-scale inference in a simulation study and illustrate its use on both a prostate cancer data set and a case-control microbiome study of the gastrointestinal tracts in children from underdeveloped countries who have been recently diagnosed with moderate-to-severe diarrhea.

BVAR-Connect: A Variational Bayes Approach to Multi-Subject Vector Autoregressive Models for Inference on Brain Connectivity Networks.

In this paper we propose BVAR-connect, a variational inference approach to a Bayesian multi-subject vector autoregressive (VAR) model for inference on effective brain connectivity based on resting-state functional MRI data. The modeling framework uses a Bayesian variable selection approach that flexibly integrates multi-modal data, in particular structural diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data, into the prior construction. The variational inference approach we develop allows scalability of the methods and results in the ability to estimate subject- and group-level brain connectivity networks over whole-brain parcellations of the data. We provide a brief description of a user-friendly MATLAB GUI released for public use. We assess performance on simulated data, where we show that the proposed inference method can achieve comparable accuracy to the sampling-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach but at a much lower computational cost. We also address the case of subject groups with imbalanced sample sizes. Finally, we illustrate the methods on resting-state functional MRI and structural DTI data on children with a history of traumatic injury.

MicroBVS: Dirichlet-tree multinomial regression models with Bayesian variable selection - an R package.

BACKGROUND: Understanding the relation between the human microbiome and modulating factors, such as diet, may help researchers design intervention strategies that promote and maintain healthy microbial communities. Numerous analytical tools are available to help identify these relations, oftentimes via automated variable selection methods. However, available tools frequently ignore evolutionary relations among microbial taxa, potential relations between modulating factors, as well as model selection uncertainty. RESULTS: We present MicroBVS, an R package for Dirichlet-tree multinomial models with Bayesian variable selection, for the identification of covariates associated with microbial taxa abundance data. The underlying Bayesian model accommodates phylogenetic structure in the abundance data and various parameterizations of covariates' prior probabilities of inclusion. CONCLUSION: While developed to study the human microbiome, our software can be employed in various research applications, where the aim is to generate insights into the relations between a set of covariates and compositional data with or without a known tree-like structure.

Bayesian modeling of multiple structural connectivity networks during the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common neurodegenerative disease. The aim of this study is to infer structural changes in brain connectivity resulting from disease progression using cortical thickness measurements from a cohort of participants who were either healthy control, or with mild cognitive impairment, or Alzheimer's disease patients. For this purpose, we develop a novel approach for inference of multiple networks with related edge values across groups. Specifically, we infer a Gaussian graphical model for each group within a joint framework, where we rely on Bayesian hierarchical priors to link the precision matrix entries across groups. Our proposal differs from existing approaches in that it flexibly learns which groups have the most similar edge values, and accounts for the strength of connection (rather than only edge presence or absence) when sharing information across groups. Our results identify key alterations in structural connectivity that may reflect disruptions to the healthy brain, such as decreased connectivity within the occipital lobe with increasing disease severity. We also illustrate the proposed method through simulations, where we demonstrate its performance in structure learning and precision matrix estimation with respect to alternative approaches.