Title
Behavioral Relevance Of The Dynamics Of The Functional Brain Connectome
Abstract
While many previous studies assumed the functional connectivity (FC) between brain regions to be stationary, recent studies have demonstrated that FC dynamically varies across time. However, two challenges have limited the interpretability of dynamic FC information. First, a principled framework for selecting the temporal extent of the window used to examine the dynamics is lacking and this has resulted in ad-hoc selections of window lengths and subsequent divergent results. Second, it is unclear whether there is any behavioral relevance to the dynamics of the functional connectome in addition to that obtained from conventional static FC (SFC). In this work, we address these challenges by first proposing a principled framework for selecting the extent of the temporal windows in a dynamic and data-driven fashion based on statistical tests of the stationarity of time series. Further, we propose a method involving three levels of clustering-across space, time, and subjects-which allow for group-level inferences of the dynamics. Next, using a large resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral dataset from the Human Connectome Project, we demonstrate that metrics derived from dynamic FC can explain more than twice the variance in 75 behaviors across different domains (alertness, cognition, emotion, and personality traits) as compared with SFC in healthy individuals. Further, we found that individuals with brain networks exhibiting greater dynamics performed more favorably in behavioral tasks. This indicates that the ease with which brain regions engage or disengage may provide potential biomarkers for disorders involving altered neural circuitry.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1089/brain.2014.0300
BRAIN CONNECTIVITY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
adaptive clustering, brain network, dynamic functional connectivity, human behavioral, resting-state fMRI
Journal
4
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
2158-0014
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.66
23
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hao Jia1110.66
Xiaoping Hu2945.37
Gopikrishna Deshpande319515.65