scholarly journals Dynamic expression of brain functional systems disclosed by fine-scale analysis of edge time series

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Olaf Sporns ◽  
Joshua Faskowitz ◽  
Andreia Sofia Teixeira ◽  
Sarah A Cutts ◽  
Richard F. Betzel

Functional connectivity (FC) describes the statistical dependence between neuronal populations or brain regions in resting-state fMRI studies and is commonly estimated as the Pearson correlation of time courses. Clustering or community detection reveals densely coupled sets of regions constituting resting-state networks or functional systems. These systems manifest most clearly when FC is sampled over longer epochs but appear to fluctuate on shorter time scales. Here, we propose a new approach to reveal temporal fluctuations in neuronal time series. Un-wrapping FC signal correlations yields pairwise co-fluctuation time series, one for each node pair or edge, and allows tracking of fine-scale dynamics across the network. Co-fluctuations partition the network, at each time step, into exactly two communities. Sampled over time, the overlay of these bipartitions, a binary decomposition of the original time series, very closely approximates functional connectivity. Bipartitions exhibit characteristic spatiotemporal patterns that are reproducible across participants and imaging runs, capture individual differences, and disclose fine-scale temporal expression of functional systems. Our findings document that functional systems appear transiently and intermittently, and that FC results from the overlay of many variable instances of system expression. Potential applications of this decomposition of functional connectivity into a set of binary patterns are discussed.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Sporns ◽  
Joshua Faskowitz ◽  
Andreia Sofia Teixera ◽  
Richard F. Betzel

AbstractFunctional connectivity (FC) describes the statistical dependence between brain regions in resting-state fMRI studies and is usually estimated as the Pearson correlation of time courses. Clustering reveals densely coupled sets of regions constituting a set of resting-state networks or functional systems. These systems manifest most clearly when FC is sampled over longer epochs lasting many minutes but appear to fluctuate on shorter time scales. Here, we propose a new approach to track these temporal fluctuations. Un-wrapping FC signal correlations yields pairwise co-fluctuation time series, one for each node pair/edge, and reveals fine-scale dynamics across the network. Co-fluctuations partition the network, at each time step, into exactly two communities. Sampled over time, the overlay of these bipartitions, a binary decomposition of the original time series, very closely approximates functional connectivity. Bipartitions exhibit characteristic spatiotemporal patterns that are reproducible across participants and imaging sessions and disclose fine-scale profiles of the time-varying levels of expression of functional systems. Our findings document that functional systems appear transiently and intermittently, and that FC results from the overlay of many variable instances of system expression. Potential applications of this decomposition of functional connectivity into a set of binary patterns are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiaxin Peng ◽  
Fan Yao ◽  
Qiuyu Li ◽  
Qianmin Ge ◽  
Wenqing Shi ◽  
...  

AbstractPrevious neuroimaging studies demonstrated that patients with strabismus or amblyopia can show significant functional and anatomical changes in the brain, but alterations of interhemispheric functional connectivity (FC) have not been well studied in this population. The current study analyzed whole-brain changes of interhemispheric FC in children with strabismus and amblyopia (CSA) using voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC).A total of 24 CSA (16 males and 8 females) and 24 normal controls (NCs) consisting of 16 and 8 age-, sex, and education-matched males and females, respectively, underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans in the resting state. According to Gaussian random field theory, changes in the resting state FC (rsFC) between hemispheres were evaluated using the VMHC method. The relationships between mean VMHC values in multiple brain regions and behavioral performance were evaluated by Pearson correlation analysis. In contrast to NCs, the CSA group showed significantly decreased VMHC values in the bilateral cerebellum, bilateral frontal superior orbital (frontal sup orb), bilateral temporal inferior(temporal inf),and bilateral frontal superior(frontal sup). CSA have abnormal interhemispheric FC in many brain regions, which may reflect dysfunction of eye movements and visual fusion. These findings might provide insight into the underlying pathogenetic mechanisms of CSA.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Kohut ◽  
Dionyssios Mintzopoulos ◽  
Brian D. Kangas ◽  
Hannah Shields ◽  
Kelly Brown ◽  
...  

AbstractLong-term cocaine use is associated with a variety of neural and behavioral deficits that impact daily function. This study was conducted to examine the effects of chronic cocaine self-administration on resting-state functional connectivity of the dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) and putamen—two brain regions involved in cognitive function and motoric behavior—identified in a whole brain analysis. Six adult male squirrel monkeys self-administered cocaine (0.32 mg/kg/inj) over 140 sessions. Six additional monkeys that had not received any drug treatment for ~1.5 years served as drug-free controls. Resting-state fMRI imaging sessions at 9.4 Tesla were conducted under isoflurane anesthesia. Functional connectivity maps were derived using seed regions placed in the left dACC or putamen. Results show that cocaine maintained robust self-administration with an average total intake of 367 mg/kg (range: 299–424 mg/kg). In the cocaine group, functional connectivity between the dACC seed and regions primarily involved in motoric behavior was weaker, whereas connectivity between the dACC seed and areas implicated in reward and cognitive processing was stronger. In the putamen seed, weaker widespread connectivity was found between the putamen and other motor regions as well as with prefrontal areas that regulate higher-order executive function; stronger connectivity was found with reward-related regions. dACC connectivity was associated with total cocaine intake. These data indicate that functional connectivity between regions involved in motor, reward, and cognitive processing differed between subjects with recent histories of cocaine self-administration and controls; in dACC, connectivity appears to be related to cumulative cocaine dosage during chronic exposure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1095-1102
Author(s):  
Jian Yang ◽  
Xu Mao ◽  
Ning Liu ◽  
Ning Zhong

Resting-state functional connectivity (FC) changes dynamically and major depressive disorder (MDD) has abnormality in functional connectivity networks (FCNs), but few existing resting-state fMRI study on MDD utilizes the dynamics, especially for identifying depressive individuals from healthy controls. In this paper, we propose a methodological procedure for differential diagnosis of depression, called HN3D, which is based on high-order functional connectivity networks (HFCN). Firstly, HN3D extracts time series by independent component analysis, and partitions them into overlapped short series by sliding time window. Secondly, it constructs a FCN for each time window and concatenates correlation matrices of all FCNs to generate correlation time series. Then, correlation time series are grouped into different clusters and high-order correlations for HFCN is calculated based on their means. Finally, graph based features of HFCNs are extracted and selected for a linear discriminative classifier. Tested on 21 healthy controls and 20 MDD patients, HN3D achieved its best 100% classification accuracy, which is much higher than results based on stationary FCNs. In addition, most discriminative components of HN3D locate in default mode network and visual network, which are consistent with existing stationary-based results on depression. Though HN3D needs to be studied further, it is helpful for the differential diagnosis of depression and might have potentiality in identifying relevant biomarkers.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Chen Chen ◽  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Xiao-Wei Li ◽  
Wenqing Xia ◽  
Xu Feng ◽  
...  

Objective. Subjective tinnitus is hypothesized to arise from aberrant neural activity; however, its neural bases are poorly understood. To identify aberrant neural networks involved in chronic tinnitus, we compared the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns of tinnitus patients and healthy controls.Materials and Methods. Resting-state fMRI measurements were obtained from a group of chronic tinnitus patients (n=29) with normal hearing and well-matched healthy controls (n=30). Regional homogeneity (ReHo) analysis and functional connectivity analysis were used to identify abnormal brain activity; these abnormalities were compared to tinnitus distress.Results. Relative to healthy controls, tinnitus patients had significant greater ReHo values in several brain regions including the bilateral anterior insula (AI), left inferior frontal gyrus, and right supramarginal gyrus. Furthermore, the left AI showed enhanced functional connectivity with the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), while the right AI had enhanced functional connectivity with the right MFG; these measures were positively correlated with Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaires (r=0.459,P=0.012andr=0.479,P=0.009, resp.).Conclusions. Chronic tinnitus patients showed abnormal intra- and interregional synchronization in several resting-state cerebral networks; these abnormalities were correlated with clinical tinnitus distress. These results suggest that tinnitus distress is exacerbated by attention networks that focus on internally generated phantom sounds.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Narges Moradi ◽  
Mehdy Dousty ◽  
Roberto C. Sotero

AbstractResting-state functional connectivity MRI (rs-fcMRI) is a common method for mapping functional brain networks. However, estimation of these networks is affected by the presence of a common global systemic noise, or global signal (GS). Previous studies have shown that the common preprocessing steps of removing the GS may create spurious correlations between brain regions. In this paper, we decompose fMRI signals into 5 spatial and 3 temporal intrinsic mode functions (SIMF and TIMF, respectively) by means of the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), which is an adaptive data-driven method widely used to analyze nonlinear and nonstationary phenomena. For each SIMF, brain connectivity matrices were computed by means of the Pearson correlation between TIMFs of different brain areas. Thus, instead of a single connectivity matrix, we obtained 5 × 3 = 15 functional connectivity matrices. Given the high value obtained for large-scale topological measures such as transitivity, in the low spatial maps (SIMF3, SIMF4, and SIMF5), our results suggest that these maps can be considered as spatial global signal masks. Thus, the spatiotemporal EMD of fMRI signals automatically regressed out the GS, although, interestingly, the removed noisy component was voxel-specific. We compared the performance of our method with the conventional GS regression and to the results when the GS was not removed. While the correlation pattern identified by the other methods suffers from a low level of precision, our approach demonstrated a high level of accuracy in extracting the correct correlation between different brain regions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luoyao Pang ◽  
Huidi Li ◽  
Quanying Liu ◽  
Yue-jia Luo ◽  
Dean Mobbs ◽  
...  

Motivated dishonesty is a typical social behavior varying from person to person. Resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) is capable of identifying unique patterns from functional connectivity (FC) between brain networks. To identify the relevant neural patterns and build an interpretable model to predict dishonesty, we scanned 8-min rsfMRI before an information-passing task. In the task, we employed monetary rewards to induce dishonesty. We applied both connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) and region-of-interest (ROI) analysis to examine the association between FC and dishonesty. CPM indicated that the stronger FC between fronto-parietal and default mode networks can predict a higher dishonesty rate. The ROIs were set in the regions involving four cognitive processes (self-reference, cognitive control, reward valuation, and moral regulation). The ROI analyses showed that a stronger FC between these regions and the prefrontal cortex can predict a higher dishonesty rate. Our study offers an integrated model to predict dishonesty with rsfMRI, and the results suggest that the frequent motivated dishonest behavior may require a higher engagement of social brain regions.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schwab ◽  
Ruth Harbord ◽  
Valerio Zerbi ◽  
Lloyd Elliott ◽  
Soroosh Afyouni ◽  
...  

AbstractThere are a growing number of neuroimaging methods that model spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity to allow more meaningful characterizations of brain networks. This paper proposes dynamic graphical models (DGMs) for dynamic, directed functional connectivity. DGMs are a multivariate graphical model with time-varying coefficients that describe instantaneous directed relationships between nodes. A further benefit of DGMs is that networks may contain loops and that large networks can be estimated. We use network simulations, human resting-state fMRI (N = 500) to investigate the validity and reliability of the estimated networks. We simulate systematic lags of the hemodynamic response at different brain regions to investigate how these lags potentially bias directionality estimates. In the presence of such lag confounds (0.4–0.8 seconds offset between connected nodes), our method has a sensitivity of 72%–77% to detect the true direction. Stronger lag confounds have reduced sensitivity, but do not increase false positives (i.e., directionality estimates of the opposite direction). In human resting-state fMRI, we find the DMN has consistent influence on the cerebellar, the limbic and the auditory/temporal network, as well a consistent reciprocal relationship between the visual medial and visual lateral network. Finally, we apply the method in a small mouse fMRI sample and discover a highly plausible relationship between areas in the hippocampus feeding into the cingulate cortex. We provide a computationally efficient implementation of DGM as a free software package for R.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongsheng Zhang ◽  
Jie Gao ◽  
Xuejiao Yan ◽  
Min Tang ◽  
Xia Zhe ◽  
...  

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