The individual functional connectome is unique and stable over months to years

Abstract

Using fMRI and functional connectivity analyses, it is possible to establish a functional connectome for an individual. The extent to which functional connectomes from adolescents and young adults remain identifiable across many years has not been investigated. Here we show in three publically available longitudinal resting-state fMRI datasets that connectome-based identification of adolescents and young adults scanned 1-3 years apart is possible at levels well above chance using whole-brain functional connectivity data. When we restrict the identification process to specific edges, we find that edges in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices tend to lead to the highest identification rates. We also demonstrate that highly unique edges contributing the most to a successful ID tend to connect nodes in these same cortical regions, while edges contributing the least tend to connect cross-hemispheric homologs. These results suggest that despite developmental changes, adolescent and young adult subjects have unique and stable functional connectomes and that the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices are important in defining individual uniqueness in younger subjects.

Individual identification and individual variability analysis based on cortical folding features in developing infant singletons and twins

“…For example, Miranda‐Dominguez et al found that the unique connections in high‐order association regions in frontal and parietal cortices mainly contribute to the individual identification (Miranda‐Dominguez et al, ), and they further demonstrated that the high‐order systems, including the frontoparietal, dorsal attention, ventral attention, cingulo‐opercular and default systems, present substantial heritability variability (Miranda‐Dominguez et al, ). Horien et al found that both medial frontal and frontoparietal networks are unique and stable for individual identification during infancy (Horien et al, ). Finn et al found that the high‐order frontoparietal functional network, comprised of frontal, parietal and temporal lobes, is of the highest identification power (Finn et al, ).…”

“…Accordingly, there has been a growing interest in the fingerprinting capability of the human brain, that is, whether the features of the human brain are unique and distinguishable for individual identification. Several studies performed individual identification based on structural or functional characteristics of the human brain, for example, morphological shape description of cortical and subcortical structures, named BrainPrint (Wachinger et al, ; Wachinger, Golland, & Reuter, ), shape description of white matter fibers, named FiberPrint (Kumar, Desrosiers, Siddiqi, Colliot, & Toews, ; Kumar, Toews, Chauvin, Colliot, & Desrosiers, ), and functional connectivity networks, named functional connectome fingerprint (Biazoli Jr et al, ; Finn et al, ; Horien, Shen, Scheinost, & Constable, ; Kaufmann et al, ; Liu et al, ; Tavor et al, ).…”

“…Of note, most of the above studies focus on adult individual identification, in which the brain structure and function have been relatively stable in the duration across different scans. Only a few studies based on functional connectome involve the developing brain from adolescent datasets (Horien et al, ; Kaufmann et al, ). To date, no study has investigated the fingerprinting property of cortical folding of the dynamic developing infant brain.…”

Modelling Subject Variability in the Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Functional Modes

“…Firstly, there has been much recent interest in 'functional fingerprints'-that is, whether functional connectivity acts as a unique signature with which we can identify subjects. There have been several elegant demonstrations of this, suggesting that the functional information that we are able to capture with fMRI does indeed distinguish individuals 14 [Finn et al 2015;Horien et al 2018b]. However, we arguably already have a much more compelling way of fingerprinting subjects: structural data and the macro-anatomical folding patterns give a way to identify subjects that is simple, reliable and stable over decades.…”

Cortical electrophysiological evidence for individual‐specific temporal organization of brain functional networks

“…With the development of personalized neuroscience, assessing the stability and reproducibility of brain profiles becomes a central issue. There is evidence that the individual connectome of the brain is as unique to the individual as their fingerprint (Finn et al, ; Horien, Shen, Scheinost, & Constable, ; Kong et al, ). However, these studies were mostly based on static functional connectivity (sFC), which assumes connections as spatially and temporally stationary over a measurement period.…”