RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Resting-state fMRI correlations: from link-wise unreliability to whole brain stability
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 081976
DO 10.1101/081976
A1 Mario Pannunzi
A1 Rikkert Hindriks
A1 Ruggero G. Bettinardi
A1 Elisabeth Wenger
A1 Nina Lisofsky
A1 Johan Martensson
A1 Oisin Butler
A1 Elisa Filevich
A1 Maxi Becker
A1 Martyna Lochstet
A1 Ulman Lindenberger
A1 Simone Kühn
A1 Gustavo Deco
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/19/081976.abstract
AB The functional architecture of spontaneous BOLD fluctuations has been characterized in detail by numerous studies, demonstrating its potential relevance as a biomarker. However, the systematic investigation of its consistency is still in its infancy. Here, we analyze both the within- and between-subject variability as well as the test-retest reliability of resting-state functional connectivity (FC) estimates in a unique data set comprising multiple fMRI scans (42) from 5 subjects, and 50 single scans from 50 subjects. To this aim we adopted a statistical framework enabling us to disentangle the contribution of different sources of variability and their dependence on scan duration, and showed that the low reliability of single links can be largely improved using multiple scans per subject. Moreover, we show that practically all observed inter-region variability (at the link-level) is not significant and due to the statistical uncertainty of the estimator itself rather than to genuine variability among areas. Finally, we use the proposed statistical framework to demonstrate that, despite the poor consistency of single links, the information carried by the whole-brain spontaneous correlation structure is indeed robust, and can in fact be used as a functional fingerprint.