The aim of this seminar is to discuss innovative approaches that exploit computational intelligence to infer new knowledge from neuroimaging data. The main challenge is to devise methods able to cope with the high dimensionality and the low signal-to-noise ratio that characterizes this kind of data. The first part of the talk is focused on functional neuroimaging and how clustering techniques can be used to derive robust sets of features from whole brain maps. The advantage of this approach compared to traditional univariate feature selection methods is that of preserving the information about the anatomical regions that form clusters and of taking into account relationships among features. The second part of the talk will describe a multi-view learning framework that combines functional MRI and diffusion tensor imaging to study brain connectivity. In this approach, structural and functional connectivity features are extracted from multi-modal MRI images with a clustering technique, and used for the multi-view classification of different phenotypes of neurodegeneration by an ensemble learning method (random forest). The results highlight the potentials of mining complementary information from the integration of multiple data views in the study of neurodegenerative diseases.

Roberto Tagliaferri is full professor in Computer Science at the University of Salerno. He has had courses in Computer Architectures, Artificial and Computational Intelligence, and Bioinformatics for computer scientists and biologists.He has been co-organizer of international workshops and schools on Neural Nets, Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics. He has been co-editor of special issues on international journals and of Proceedings of International conferences. He is Senior Member of the IEEE "Computational Intelligence" and "System, Man and Cybernetics" societies and of INNS. He was chair of the Italy Chapter of the IEEE CIS from 2013 to 2017. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics and of Source Code in Medicine and Biology of Biomed Central, and he has been co-editor of special issues on international journals and of proceedings of international workshops in the areas of Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics. His research activity has been oriented to Computational Intelligence models and applications in the areas of Astrophysics, Biomedicine and Bioinformatics.