Detecting Dependency Structure of the Brain Motor Network in Resting State fMRI data of Parkinson Disease using Copulas

Functional changes in the brain motor network are responsible for the major clinical features of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Recent studies on investigation of the brain function show that there are spontaneous fluctuations between regions at rest as resting state network affected in various disorders. In this paper, we examine changes of functional dependency between brain regions of interest associated with known anatomical pathology in Parkinson Disease (PD) using copula theory on resting state fMRI. Five types of copulas were tested: Gaussian and t (Euclidean), Clayton, Gumbel and Frank (Archimedean). We used an efficient maximum likelihood procedure for estimating copula parameters. Goodness of fits was tested using root mean square error (RMSE) and kulback-leibler divergence between each copula function and joint empirical cumulative distribution. Control vs PD group comparison was also done on dependency parameter using parametric and nonparametric tests. The results show that functional dependency between cerebellum and basal ganglia is much stronger in PD than in control. In this paper, we proposed for the first time that joint distribution characteristics could potentially provide information on discriminative features for functional connectivity analysis between healthy and patients.