Fast Whole-Brain, Geometry-Aware Functional Alignment for Cross-Subject Decoding
Pierre-Louis Barbarant, Florent Meyniel, Bertrand Thirion
Abstract
Decoding brain activity is useful for characterizing brain processes and understanding the functional architecture underlying cognition. However, the inter-individual variability in brain response patterns limits the development of decoders that generalize across individuals. A solution to this challenge is functional alignment: aligning functional data across individuals before training population-level decoders. The core issue is to strike the balance between aligning functional features and preserving the anatomical structure, while maintaining computational efficiency. We introduce a new functional alignment method for fMRI, SpectralOT, that embeds cortical geometry into Laplace-Beltrami eigenmodes along functional data to regularize the alignment.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.