Metabolic and functional connectivity provide unique and complementary insights into cognition-connectome relationships

Abstract

A major challenge in current cognitive neuroscience is how functional brain connectivity gives rise to human cognition. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) describes brain connectivity based on cerebral oxygenation dynamics (hemodynamic connectivity), whereas [18 F]-fluorodeoxyglucose functional positron emission tomography (FDG-fPET) describes brain connectivity based on cerebral glucose uptake (metabolic connectivity), each providing a unique characterisation of the human brain. How these two modalities differ in their contribution to cognition and behaviour is unclear. We used simultaneous resting-state FDG-fPET/fMRI to investigate how hemodynamic connectivity and metabolic connectivity relate to cognitive function by applying partial least squares analyses. Results revealed that while for both modalities the frontoparietal anatomical subdivisions related the strongest to cognition, using hemodynamic measures this network expressed executive functioning, episodic memory, and depression, while for metabolic measures this network exclusively expressed executive functioning. These findings demonstrate the unique advantages that simultaneous FDG-PET/fMRI has to provide a comprehensive understanding of the neural mechanisms that underpin cognition and highlights the importance of multimodality imaging in cognitive neuroscience research.

White Matter Microstructural Correlates of Cognitive and Motor Functioning Revealed via Multimodal Multivariate Analysis

“…Standard univariate approaches to understanding the brain-behaviour relationship implicitly ignore both the overlap between tasks and with brain systems (Poldrack, 2010;Varoquaux et al, 2018). Multivariate approaches have shown promise in identifying latent behavioural factors (Schöttner et al, 2023) that may be more directly tied to brain structure and function (Price & Friston, 2005;Varoquaux et al, 2018), with recent work illustrating the power of the approach in identifying multiple functional and/or structural regions supporting memory and visually guided motor function (Pur et al, 2022), and cognition (Voigt et al, 2023;Ziegler et al, 2013).…”