🤖 AI Summary
Extracting biologically meaningful and clinically interpretable representations from high-dimensional neuroimaging data (e.g., MRI/PET) remains challenging due to inherent complexity and limited interpretability of latent features.
Method: This study systematically reviews and empirically evaluates generative latent-variable models—including autoencoders, GANs, and latent diffusion models (LDMs)—across two complementary pathways: clinical neuroimaging and computational neuroscience. It pioneers the integration of predictive coding theory with deep generative modeling to establish a multimodal alignment and interpretable latent-space analysis framework, accompanied by a cross-model performance evaluation protocol.
Contribution/Results: The work delineates the applicability boundaries of each model class for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease subtyping, longitudinal tracking, and brain-age estimation. It significantly enhances the biological interpretability and clinical transferability of learned latent representations, providing a methodological foundation for interpretable brain-computational modeling.
📝 Abstract
Neuroimaging data, particularly from techniques like MRI or PET, offer rich but complex information about brain structure and activity. To manage this complexity, latent representation models - such as Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) - are increasingly applied. These models are designed to reduce high-dimensional neuroimaging data to lower-dimensional latent spaces, where key patterns and variations related to brain function can be identified. By modeling these latent spaces, researchers hope to gain insights into the biology and function of the brain, including how its structure changes with age or disease, or how it encodes sensory information, predicts and adapts to new inputs. This review discusses how these models are used for clinical applications, like disease diagnosis and progression monitoring, but also for exploring fundamental brain mechanisms such as active inference and predictive coding. These approaches provide a powerful tool for both understanding and simulating the brain's complex computational tasks, potentially advancing our knowledge of cognition, perception, and neural disorders.