Classification of Cognitive States using Task-Specific Connectivity Features

Human brain activity maps are produced by functional MRI (fMRI) research that describes the average level of engagement during a specific task of various brain regions. Functional connectivity describes the interrelationship, integrated performance, and organization of these different brain regions. This study investigates functional connectivity to quantify the interactions between different brain regions engaged concurrently in a specific task. The key focus of this study was to introduce and demonstrate task-specific functional connectivity among brain regions using fMRI data and decode cognitive states by proposing a novel classifier using connectivity features. Two connectivity models were considered: a graph-based task-specific functional connectivity and a Granger causality-transfer entropy framework. Connectivity strengths obtained among brain regions were used for cognitive state classification. The parameters of the nodal and global graph analysis from the graph-based connectivity framework were considered, and the transfer entropy values of the causal connectivity model were considered as features for the cognitive state classification. The proposed model achieved an average accuracy of 95% on the StarPlus fMRI dataset and showed an improvement of 5% compared to the existing Tensor-SVD classification algorithm.