DWI Connectome-based Sex Classification in Young using Supervised Variational Autoencoder

Abstract

During adolescence, significant changes in brain development are influenced by hormonal changes that impact both the body and the brain. This study presents sex classification in 787 young adults having age range of 15-25 years using Diffusion-weighted (DWI) structural connectome, focusing on 82 Desikan-Killiany atlas ROIs. A supervised variational autoencoder (SVAE) is used to extract latent space features from DWI connectome data. Although several studies explored differences in brain structure and function between sexes, the main contribution of this study lies in incorporating SVAE to learn a compact, regularized latent representation for the task of sex classification. Initial exploratory data analysis shows that these features can capture the differences in sex-specific latent space patterns. Subsequently, the learned latent space SVAE features are fed to different ML models for sex classification. Among the considered ML classifiers, the multi-layer perceptron yields the highest accuracy of 80% in classifying sex. This demonstrates the effectiveness of SVAE in learning compact, informative representations from DWI connectome for sex classification. The present work highlights the potential of using DWI brain connectomics and deep learning to differentiate sex, paving the way for future research on diverse populations that may include transgender individuals, to better understand sex-related variations in brain structure.