A novel meta-analytic approach: Mining frequent co-activation patterns in neuroimaging databases

In recent years, coordinate-based meta-analyses have become a powerful and widely used tool to study co-activity across neuroimaging experiments, a development that was supported by the emergence of large-scale neuroimaging databases like BrainMap. However, the evaluation of co-activation patterns is constrained by the fact that previous coordinate-based meta-analysis techniques like Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) and Multilevel Kernel Density Analysis (MKDA) reveal all brain regions that show convergent activity within a dataset without taking into account actual within-experiment co-occurrence patterns. To overcome this issue we here propose a novel meta-analytic approach named PaMiNI that utilizes a combination of two well-established data-mining techniques, Gaussian mixture modeling and the Apriori algorithm. By this, PaMiNI enables a data-driven detection of frequent co-activation patterns within neuroimaging datasets. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated by means of several analyses on simulated data as well as a real application. The analyses of the simulated data show that PaMiNI identifies the brain regions underlying the simulated activation foci and perfectly separates the co-activation patterns of the experiments in the simulations. Furthermore, PaMiNI still yields good results when activation foci of distinct brain regions become closer together or if they are non-Gaussian distributed. For the further evaluation, a real dataset on working memory experiments is used, which was previously examined in an ALE meta-analysis and hence allows a cross-validation of both methods. In this latter analysis, PaMiNI revealed a fronto-parietal “core” network of working memory and furthermore indicates a left-lateralization in this network. Finally, to encourage a widespread usage of this new method, the PaMiNI approach was implemented into a publicly available software system.