An Adaptive Space-Filling Curve Trajectory for Ordering 3D Datasets to 1D: Application to Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data for Classification

In this work, we develop an adaptive, near-optimal, 3-Dimensional (3D) to 1D ordering methodology for brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, using a space-filling curve (SFC) trajectory, which is adaptive to brain’s shape as captured by MRI. We present the pseudocode of the heuristics for developing the SFC trajectory. We apply this trajectory to functional MRI brain activation maps from a schizophrenia study, compress the data, obtain features, and perform classification of schizophrenia patients vs. normal controls. We compare the classification results with those of a linear ordering trajectory, which has been the traditional method for ordering 3D MRI data to 1D. We report that the adaptive SFC trajectory-based classification performance is superior than the linear ordering trajectory-based classification.