A new spatially constrained NMF with application to fMRI

In this paper the problem of BOLD detection is addressed. The focus here is on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), which is a data driven method and able to provide part-based representation of data. A new constrained optimization problem is proposed for the purpose of BOLD detection. The proposed constraint imposes some prior spatial information of active area inside the brain, on the decomposition process. The constraint is built up based on the type of stimulus and available physiological knowledge of the brain performance. The simulation results on both synthetic and real fMRI data show that applying the proposed constraint improves the BOLD detection performance.