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CHAPTER

MULTILEVEL CLASSIFICATION

FRAMEWORK OF fMRI DATA: A BIG 6

DATA APPROACH

† ‡ ‡
Luina Pani*, Somnath Karmakar , Chinmaya Misra , Satya Ranjan Dash
School of Computer Engineering, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, India* Government College
†
of Engineering and Leather Technology, Kolkata, India School of Computer Applications, Kalinga Institute of Industrial
Technology, Bhubaneswar, India ‡

6.1 INTRODUCTION
The brain is the master organ in our body and performs a multitude of vital functions. The brain em-
ploys nerve cells or neurons to perform these tasks. The activities of neurons fluctuate depending on the
pattern of the task. Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) is a method to
assess neuronal activity, which is correlated with brain activity [1, 2]. fMRI is noninvasive and harm-
less as it does not involve any surgical procedure, or exposure to detrimental electromagnetic radiation.
fMRI measures various activities of the brain by identifying changes linked with neuronal activation
and blood flow to the cerebral region. When the brain utilizes an area, blood flow to that region in-
creases considerably. We can use fMRI to build activation maps to show which parts of the brain
are involved in a certain cerebral process. These experiments are widely used to understand various
neurobehavioral disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Functional MRI has a comparatively high spatial and temporal resolution and is a very powerful
method to record brain functions. The subject is placed in the magnet of an MRI machine, where dif-
ferent kinds of stimulus such as sound or visual scenes can be administered in a controlled fashion.
There is also a facility to record small motor movements or responses.
fMRI is based on the idea that the magnetic resonance of blood rich in oxygen and blood deficient in
oxygen are different. The additional energetic areas of the brain take delivery of extra oxygenated
blood [3, 4]. The fMRI records this augmented flow of blood to find out which area is more active.
The extent of flow, quantity of blood, and consumption of oxygen constitutes the blood-oxygen-
level-dependent (BOLD) signal. The protons in the vicinity of oxygenated blood produce the most
powerful signals. These signals are processed by a computer to generate a three-dimensional image
of the brain, which is stored in the form of voxels. Each voxel corresponds to thousands of nerve cells
or neurons.
A huge amount of data is produced with the increase in number of networking home appliances,
vehicles, and of several other devices, and the information captured by companies and social media.
These data can be referred as big data, which is not only very large in volume, but also high in variety

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