Functional parcellation of the hippocampus by semi-supervised clustering of resting state fMRI data

Many unsupervised methods are widely used for parcellating the brain. However, unsupervised methods aren’t able to integrate prior information, obtained from such as exiting functional neuroanatomy studies, to parcellate the brain, whereas the prior information guided semi-supervised method can generate more reliable brain parcellation. In this study, we propose a novel semi-supervised clustering method for parcellating the brain into spatially and functionally consistent parcels based on resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Particularly, the prior supervised and spatial information is integrated into spectral clustering to achieve reliable brain parcellation. The proposed method has been validated in the hippocampus parcellation based on resting state fMRI data of 20 healthy adult subjects. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method could successfully parcellate the hippocampus into head, body and tail parcels. The distinctive functional connectivity patterns of these parcels have further demonstrated the validity of the parcellation results. The effects of aging on the three hippocampus parcels’ functional connectivity were also explored across the healthy adult subjects. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method had better performance on functional homogeneity. Furthermore, the proposed method had good test–retest reproducibility validated by parcellating the hippocampus based on three repeated resting state fMRI scans from 24 healthy adult subjects.