Guiding and interpreting brain network classification with transcriptional data

The investigation of brain networks has yielded many insights that have helped to characterise many neurological and psychiatric disorders. In particular, network classification of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is an important tool for the identification of prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers of brain connectivity disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. However, existing generic network classification methods provide no direct information on the underlying molecular mechanisms of the selected functional connectivity features when applied to fMRI data. To address this, we propose a novel fMRI network classification method that incorporates brain transcriptional data using a user-specified gene set collection (GSC) to construct feature groups for use in classification of brain connectivity data. The use of GSCs are an opportunity to incorporate knowledge of potential molecular mechanisms which may be associated with a disease. The inclusion of transcriptional data yields improved prediction accuracy on publicly available schizophrenia fMRI data for several of the GSCs we consider. We also introduce a post-hoc interpretation framework to provide transcriptional-data-guided biological interpretations for discriminative functional connectivity features identified by existing fMRI network classification methods.