The backbone network of dynamic functional connectivity

Abstract

Temporal networks have become increasingly pervasive in many real-world applications, including the functional connectivity analysis of spatially separated regions of the brain. A major challenge in analysis of such networks is the identification of noise confounds, which introduce temporal ties that are non-essential, or links that are formed by chance due to local properties of the nodes. Several approaches have been suggested in the past for static networks or temporal networks with binary weights for extracting significant ties whose likelihood cannot be reduced to the local properties of the nodes. In this work, we propose a data-driven procedure to reveal the irreducible ties in dynamic functional connectivity of resting state fRMI data with continuous weights. This framework includes a null model that estimates the latent characteristics of the distributions of temporal links through optimization, followed by a statistical test to filter the links whose formation can be reduced to the activities and local properties of their interacting nodes. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach by applying it to a resting state fMRI dataset, and provide further discussion on various aspects and advantages of it.

Analyzing asymmetry in brain hierarchies with a linear state-space model of resting-state fMRI data

“…Multiple perspectives have been utilized to provide insights into this domain. These range from data-driven approaches, which seek to describe the time variability of functional connectivity (referred to as dynamical FC or dFC) [1, 59, 36], to more complex dynamical systems models that aim to replicate the dynamic structure of the state space [7, 78].…”