arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

A generalizable structural brain MRI foundation model built through dual-priority federated pretraining

BrainFedFM is a structural brain MRI foundation model that was federatively pretrained on 164,707 3‑D scans from 42 sites using a dual‑priority approach that emphasizes informative anatomical regions locally and prioritizes site contributions globally. The model outperformed seven baseline models—including four centralized foundation models—across 20 downstream tasks (classification, regression, segmentation), achieving a mean rank of 1.68 and a 50% performance gain, especially in classification and regression and among underrepresented populations. These results demonstrate the model’s generalizability and show that federated pretraining can effectively develop neuroimaging foundation models without pooling raw images.

By Zhen Yu, Yang Liu, Xiahai Zhuang, Qingchao Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

BrainWideBench: Benchmarking large-scale pretraining and across-animal transfer in multi-region neural recordings

BrainWideBench is a benchmark that evaluates across‑animal transfer on multi‑region neural recordings from 139 mice, covering 276 brain regions. It comprises three task suites—behavior decoding, neural activity prediction, and anatomical organization recovery—to test whether learned representations support diverse downstream objectives. The benchmark shows that while pretraining improves performance over single‑session baselines, current methods vary in transfer ability and none perform uniformly well across all suites, highlighting the challenge of developing general‑purpose neural representations.

By Alexandre Andre, Shivashriganesh P. Mahato, Vinam Arora, Keshav Balaji, Divyansha Lachi, Nanda H. Krishna, Jingyun Xiao, Yizi Zhang, Ximeng Mao, Wenrui Ma, Han Yu, International Brain Laboratory, Daniel Birman, Niccol\`o Bonacchi, Gaelle A. Chapuis, Joana A. Catarino, Felicia Davatolhagh, Mayo Faulkner, Laura Freitas-Silva, Fei Hu, Julia M. Huntenburg, Anup Khanal, In\^es Laranjeira, Petrina Lau, Guido T. Meijer, Nathaniel J. Miska, Jean-Paul Noel, Alejandro Pan-Vazquez, Georg Raiser, Cyrille Rossant, Karolina Z. Socha, Anne E. Urai, Miles J. Wells, Steven J. West, Olivier Winter, Blake Richards, Guillaume Lajoie, Cole Hurwitz, Mehdi Azabou, Matthew R. Whiteway, Liam Paninski, Eva L. Dyer
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

A Generalizable Feature Extractor for Alzheimer's-Related Brain MRI Tasks

The study investigates whether a compact, supervised 3D CNN pretrained for brain‑age prediction can act as a reusable foundation model for various Alzheimer's‑related neuroimaging tasks. By freezing the 7.18 million weights and adding only ~1 % of trainable parameters via Low‑Rank Adaptation, the model achieved high performance across six experiments, including dementia classification, MCI progression prediction, amyloid positivity detection, and volume estimation of hippocampal and white matter hypointensities. The results demonstrate that the pretrained brain‑age model generalizes well to new datasets without retraining, offering a data‑efficient alternative to larger networks.

By Reza Rajabli, D. Louis Collins
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

A Scaling Study for fMRI Foundation Models

The study investigates how data volume, model size, and training duration affect the performance of fMRI foundation models. Using over 200 datasets and 10,000 GPU‑hours, the authors find that larger models benefit more from additional data, and that at a fixed compute budget, increasing data yields greater gains than enlarging the model. By selecting optimal combinations of data, size, and duration, they produce models that outperform existing fMRI foundation models on out‑of‑distribution tasks while requiring less pretraining compute.

By Wenhao Ye, Xuanye Pan, Junfeng Xia, Junxiang Zhang, Mo Wang, Quanying Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

EEG-FM-Compass: Progress, Benchmarking, and Future Directions for EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2601. 17883v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (FMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for brain-computer interfaces, aiming to learn transferable neural representations from large-scale heterogeneous recordings.

By Dingkun Liu, Yuheng Chen, Zhu Chen, Zhenyao Cui, Yaozhi Wen, Jiayu An, Jingwei Luo, Dongrui Wu