Training fMRI Classifiers to Discriminate Cognitive States across Multiple Subjects

We consider learning to classify cognitive states of human subjects, based on their brain activity observed via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This problem is important because such classifiers constitute “virtual sensors” of hidden cognitive states, which may be useful in cognitive science research and clinical applications. In recent work, Mitchell, et al. [6,7,9] have demonstrated the feasibility of training such classifiers for individual human subjects (e.g., to distinguish whether the subject is reading an ambiguous or unambiguous sentence, or whether they are reading a noun or a verb). Here we extend that line of research, exploring how to train classifiers that can be applied across multiple human subjects, including subjects who were not involved in training the classifier. We describe the design of several machine learning approaches to training multiple-subject classifiers, and report experimental results demonstrating the success of these methods in learning cross-subject classifiers for two different fMRI data sets.