Through their eyes: Multi-subject brain decoding with simple alignment techniques

To-date, brain decoding literature has focused on single-subject studies, that is, reconstructing stimuli presented to a subject under fMRI acquisition from the fMRI activity of the same subject. The objective of this study is to introduce a generalization technique that enables the decoding of a subject's brain based on fMRI activity of another subject, that is, cross-subject brain decoding. To this end, we also explore cross-subject data alignment techniques. Data alignment is the attempt to register different subjects in a common anatomical or functional space for further and more general analysis. We utilized the Natural Scenes Dataset, a comprehensive 7T fMRI experiment focused on vision of natural images. The dataset contains fMRI data from multiple subjects exposed to 9,841 images, where 982 images have been viewed by all subjects. Our method involved training a decoding model on one subject's data, aligning new data from other subjects to this space, and testing the decoding on the second subject based on information aligned to the first subject. We also compared different techniques for fMRI data alignment, specifically ridge regression, hyper alignment, and anatomical alignment. We found that cross-subject brain decoding is possible, even with a small subset of the dataset, specifically, using the common data, which are around 10% of the total data, namely 982 images, with performances in decoding comparable to the ones achieved by single-subject decoding. Cross-subject decoding is still feasible using half or a quarter of this number of images with slightly lower performances. Ridge regression emerged as the best method for functional alignment in fine-grained information decoding, outperforming all other techniques. By aligning multiple subjects, we achieved high-quality brain decoding and a potential reduction in scan time by 90% . This substantial decrease in scan time could open up unprecedented opportunities for more efficient experiment execution and further advancements in the field, which commonly requires prohibitive (20 hours) scan time per subject.