Riccati-regularized precision matrices for neuroimaging

The introduction of graph theory in neuroimaging has provided invaluable tools for the study of brain connectivity. These methods require the definition of a graph, which is typically derived by estimating the effective connectivity between brain regions through the optimization of an ill-posed inverse problem. Considerable efforts have been devoted to the development of methods extracting sparse connectivity graphs. The present paper aims at highlighting the benefits of an alternative approach.We investigate low-rank L2 regularized matrices recently introduced under the denomination of Riccati regularized precision matrices. We demonstrate their benefits for the analysis of cortical thickness map and the extraction of functional biomarkers from resting state fMRI scans. In addition, we explain how speed and result quality can be further improved with random projections. The promising results obtained using the Human Connectome Project dataset, as well as, the numerous possible extensions and applications suggest that Riccati precision matrices might usefully complement current sparse approaches.