Improved FastICA algorithm in fMRI data analysis using the sparsity property of the sources

•SparseFastICA is developed by adding source sparsity as a constraint to FastICA.•SparseFastICA has better robustness to noise than FastICA.•SparseFastICA has better spatial detection power than FastICA.•The performance of SparseFastICA is comparable to that of Infomax.•SparseFastICA is faster than Infomax.

BackgroundAs a blind source separation technique, independent component analysis (ICA) has many applications in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Although either temporal or spatial prior information has been introduced into the constrained ICA and semi-blind ICA methods to improve the performance of ICA in fMRI data analysis, certain types of additional prior information, such as the sparsity, has seldom been added to the ICA algorithms as constraints.New methodIn this study, we proposed a SparseFastICA method by adding the source sparsity as a constraint to the FastICA algorithm to improve the performance of the widely used FastICA. The source sparsity is estimated through a smoothed ℓ0 norm method. We performed experimental tests on both simulated data and real fMRI data to investigate the feasibility and robustness of SparseFastICA and made a performance comparison between SparseFastICA, FastICA and Infomax ICA.ResultsResults of the simulated and real fMRI data demonstrated the feasibility and robustness of SparseFastICA for the source separation in fMRI data.Comparison with existing methodsBoth the simulated and real fMRI experimental results showed that SparseFastICA has better robustness to noise and better spatial detection power than FastICA. Although the spatial detection power of SparseFastICA and Infomax did not show significant difference, SparseFastICA had faster computation speed than Infomax.ConclusionsSparseFastICA was comparable to the Infomax algorithm with a faster computation speed. More importantly, SparseFastICA outperformed FastICA in robustness and spatial detection power and can be used to identify more accurate brain networks than FastICA algorithm.