Home
The threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE) [1] approach integrates cluster information into voxel-wise statistical inference to enhance detectability of neuroimaging signal. Despite the significantly increased sensitivity, the application of TFCE is limited by several factors: (i) generalization to data structures, like brain network connectivity data is not trivial, (ii) TFCE values are in an arbitrary unit, therefore, P-values can only be obtained by a computationally demanding permutation-test.
Here, we introduce a probabilistic approach for TFCE (pTFCE), that gives a simple general framework for topology-based belief boosting.
The core of pTFCE is a conditional probability, calculated based on Bayes' rule, from the probability of voxel intensity and the threshold-wise likelihood function of the measured cluster size. We provide an estimation of these distributions based on Gaussian Random Field (GRF) theory. The conditional probabilities are then aggregated across cluster-forming thresholds by a novel incremental aggregation method. Our approach is validated on simulated and real fMRI data.
The results suggest that pTFCE is more robust to various ground truth shapes and provides a stricter control over cluster "leaking" than TFCE and, in the most realistic cases, further improves its sensitivity. Correction for multiple comparison can be trivially performed on the enhanced P-values, without the need for permutation testing, thus pTFCE is well-suitable for the improvement of statistical inference in any neuroimaging workflow.
