Spatio-dynamical decomposition: Joint spatial and dynamical criteria for FMRI Blind source separation.

Abstract

Blind source separation (BSS) recovers latent sources from observed mixtures. In brain imaging, sources occur in two domains, spatial and temporal, so a criterion applied in one leaves the other unconstrained. Independent component analysis, the most used BSS tool, exploits diversity such as non-Gaussianity and sample dependence, but in one domain at a time. Methods that use both domains apply the same criterion to each and weight them against each other. We propose spatio-dynamical decomposition (SDD), scoring maps by non-Gaussianity and timecourses by dynamical independence: how much each source's dynamics depend on the others. We normalize each score by how much it can improve on the data, eliminating the need for a weight. Across simulations and 130 naturalistic fMRI runs, SDD recovers sources distinguished by either maps or dynamics and reproduces both across disjoint episodes, while baselines trade off the two; map and timescale together also better predict stimulus tracking, with the largest gain for SDD. Together, these results show that separation is strongest when spatial and temporal domains each carry their own criterion.