Using a deep generation network reveals neuroanatomical specificity in hemispheres

Asymmetry is an important property of brain organization, but its nature is still poorly understood. Capturing the neuroanatomical components specific to each hemisphere facilitates the understanding of the establishment of brain asymmetry. Since deep generative networks (DGNs) have powerful inference and recovery capabilities, we use one hemisphere to predict the opposite hemisphere by training the DGNs, which automatically fit the built-in dependencies between the left and right hemispheres. After training, the reconstructed images approximate the homologous components in the hemisphere. We use the difference between the actual and reconstructed hemispheres to measure hemisphere-specific components due to asymmetric expression of environmental and genetic factors. The results show that our model is biologically plausible and that our proposed metric of hemispheric specialization is reliable, representing a wide range of individual variation. Together, this work provides promising tools for exploring brain asymmetry and new insights into self-supervised DGNs for representing the brain.