scholarly journals Nonlinear Functional Network Connectivity In Resting fMRI Data

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Motlaghian ◽  
Aysenil Belger ◽  
Juan Bustillo ◽  
Judith Ford ◽  
Kelvin Lim ◽  
...  

In this work, we focus on explicitly nonlinear relationships in functional networks. We introduce a technique using normalized mutual information (MI), that calculates the nonlinear correlation between different brain regions. We demonstrate our proposed approach using simulated data, then apply it to a dataset previously studied in (Damaraju et al., 2014). This resting-state fMRI data included 151 schizophrenia patients and 163 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. We first decomposed these data using group independent component analysis (ICA) and yielded 47 functionally relevant intrinsic connectivity networks. Our analysis showed a modularized 2 nonlinear relationship among brain functional networks that was particularly noticeable in the sensory and visual cortex. Interestingly, the modularity appears both meaningful and distinct from that revealed by the linear approach. Group analysis identified significant differences in nonlinear dependencies between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls particularly in visual cortex, with controls showing more nonlinearity in most cases. Certain domains, including cognitive control, and default mode, appeared much less nonlinear, whereas links between the visual and other domains showed evidence of substantial nonlinear and modular properties. Overall, these results suggest that quantifying nonlinear dependencies of functional connectivity may provide a complementary and potentially important tool for studying brain function by exposing relevant variation that is typically ignored. Further, we propose a method that captures both linear and nonlinear effects in a 'boosted' approach. This method increases the sensitivity to group differences in comparison to the standard linear approach, at the cost of being unable to separate linear and nonlinear effects.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wang ◽  
Yanshuang Ren ◽  
Wensheng Zhang

Study of functional brain network (FBN) based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has proved successful in depression disorder classification. One popular approach to construct FBN is Pearson correlation. However, it only captures pairwise relationship between brain regions, while it ignores the influence of other brain regions. Another common issue existing in many depression disorder classification methods is applying only single local feature extracted from constructed FBN. To address these issues, we develop a new method to classify fMRI data of patients with depression and healthy controls. First, we construct the FBN using a sparse low-rank model, which considers the relationship between two brain regions given all the other brain regions. Moreover, it can automatically remove weak relationship and retain the modular structure of FBN. Secondly, FBN are effectively measured by eight graph-based features from different aspects. Tested on fMRI data of 31 patients with depression and 29 healthy controls, our method achieves 95% accuracy, 96.77% sensitivity, and 93.10% specificity, which outperforms the Pearson correlation FBN and sparse FBN. In addition, the combination of graph-based features in our method further improves classification performance. Moreover, we explore the discriminative brain regions that contribute to depression disorder classification, which can help understand the pathogenesis of depression disorder.


Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (12) ◽  
pp. 1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanbing Jia ◽  
Huaguang Gu

Identifying brain regions contained in brain functional networks and functions of brain functional networks is of great significance in understanding the complexity of the human brain. The 160 regions of interest (ROIs) in the human brain determined by the Dosenbach’s template have been divided into six functional networks with different functions. In the present paper, the complexity of the human brain is characterized by the sample entropy (SampEn) of dynamic functional connectivity (FC) which is obtained by analyzing the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired from healthy participants. The 160 ROIs are clustered into six clusters by applying the K-means clustering algorithm to the SampEn of dynamic FC as well as the static FC which is also obtained by analyzing the resting-state fMRI data. The six clusters obtained from the SampEn of dynamic FC and the static FC show very high overlap and consistency ratios with the six functional networks. Furthermore, for four of six clusters, the overlap ratios corresponding to the SampEn of dynamic FC are larger than that corresponding to the static FC, and for five of six clusters, the consistency ratios corresponding to the SampEn of dynamic FC are larger than that corresponding to the static FC. The results show that the combination of machine learning methods and the FC obtained using the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals can identify the functional networks of the human brain, and nonlinear dynamic characteristics of the FC are more effective than the static characteristics of the FC in identifying brain functional networks and the complexity of the human brain.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Zimmerman ◽  
Ivan Abraham ◽  
Sara A. Schmidt ◽  
Yuliy Baryshnikov ◽  
Fatima T. Husain

Chronic tinnitus is a common and sometimes debilitating condition that lacks scientific consensus on physiological models of how the condition arises as well as any known cure. In this study, we applied a novel cyclicity analysis, which studies patterns of leader-follower relationships between two signals, to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data of brain regions acquired from subjects with and without tinnitus. Using the output from the cyclicity analysis, we were able to differentiate between these two groups with 58–67% accuracy by using a partial least squares discriminant analysis. Stability testing yielded a 70% classification accuracy for identifying individual subjects’ data across sessions 1 week apart. Additional analysis revealed that the pairs of brain regions that contributed most to the dissociation between tinnitus and controls were those connected to the amygdala. In the controls, there were consistent temporal patterns across frontal, parietal, and limbic regions and amygdalar activity, whereas in tinnitus subjects, this pattern was much more variable. Our findings demonstrate a proof-of-principle for the use of cyclicity analysis of rs-fMRI data to better understand functional brain connectivity and to use it as a tool for the differentiation of patients and controls who may differ on specific traits.


2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 181-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Sturm

Abstract: Behavioral and PET/fMRI-data are presented to delineate the functional networks subserving alertness, sustained attention, and vigilance as different aspects of attention intensity. The data suggest that a mostly right-hemisphere frontal, parietal, thalamic, and brainstem network plays an important role in the regulation of attention intensity, irrespective of stimulus modality. Under conditions of phasic alertness there is less right frontal activation reflecting a diminished need for top-down regulation with phasic extrinsic stimulation. Furthermore, a high overlap between the functional networks for alerting and spatial orienting of attention is demonstrated. These findings support the hypothesis of a co-activation of the posterior attention system involved in spatial orienting by the anterior alerting network. Possible implications of these findings for the therapy of neglect are proposed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jie Huang ◽  
Paul Beach ◽  
Andrea Bozoki ◽  
David C. Zhu

Background: Postmortem studies of brains with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) not only find amyloid-beta (Aβ) and neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) in the visual cortex, but also reveal temporally sequential changes in AD pathology from higher-order association areas to lower-order areas and then primary visual area (V1) with disease progression. Objective: This study investigated the effect of AD severity on visual functional network. Methods: Eight severe AD (SAD) patients, 11 mild/moderate AD (MAD), and 26 healthy senior (HS) controls undertook a resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) and a task fMRI of viewing face photos. A resting-state visual functional connectivity (FC) network and a face-evoked visual-processing network were identified for each group. Results: For the HS, the identified group-mean face-evoked visual-processing network in the ventral pathway started from V1 and ended within the fusiform gyrus. In contrast, the resting-state visual FC network was mainly confined within the visual cortex. AD disrupted these two functional networks in a similar severity dependent manner: the more severe the cognitive impairment, the greater reduction in network connectivity. For the face-evoked visual-processing network, MAD disrupted and reduced activation mainly in the higher-order visual association areas, with SAD further disrupting and reducing activation in the lower-order areas. Conclusion: These findings provide a functional corollary to the canonical view of the temporally sequential advancement of AD pathology through visual cortical areas. The association of the disruption of functional networks, especially the face-evoked visual-processing network, with AD severity suggests a potential predictor or biomarker of AD progression.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianjia Wang ◽  
Xichen Wu ◽  
Mingrui Li ◽  
Hui Wu ◽  
Edwin Hancock

This paper seeks to advance the state-of-the-art in analysing fMRI data to detect onset of Alzheimer’s disease and identify stages in the disease progression. We employ methods of network neuroscience to represent correlation across fMRI data arrays, and introduce novel techniques for network construction and analysis. In network construction, we vary thresholds in establishing BOLD time series correlation between nodes, yielding variations in topological and other network characteristics. For network analysis, we employ methods developed for modelling statistical ensembles of virtual particles in thermal systems. The microcanonical ensemble and the canonical ensemble are analogous to two different fMRI network representations. In the former case, there is zero variance in the number of edges in each network, while in the latter case the set of networks have a variance in the number of edges. Ensemble methods describe the macroscopic properties of a network by considering the underlying microscopic characterisations which are in turn closely related to the degree configuration and network entropy. When applied to fMRI data in populations of Alzheimer’s patients and controls, our methods demonstrated levels of sensitivity adequate for clinical purposes in both identifying brain regions undergoing pathological changes and in revealing the dynamics of such changes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (7) ◽  
pp. 1344-1359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Jahfari ◽  
Lourens Waldorp ◽  
K. Richard Ridderinkhof ◽  
H. Steven Scholte

Action selection often requires the transformation of visual information into motor plans. Preventing premature responses may entail the suppression of visual input and/or of prepared muscle activity. This study examined how the quality of visual information affects frontobasal ganglia (BG) routes associated with response selection and inhibition. Human fMRI data were collected from a stop task with visually degraded or intact face stimuli. During go trials, degraded spatial frequency information reduced the speed of information accumulation and response cautiousness. Effective connectivity analysis of the fMRI data showed action selection to emerge through the classic direct and indirect BG pathways, with inputs deriving form both prefrontal and visual regions. When stimuli were degraded, visual and prefrontal regions processing the stimulus information increased connectivity strengths toward BG, whereas regions evaluating visual scene content or response strategies reduced connectivity toward BG. Response inhibition during stop trials recruited the indirect and hyperdirect BG pathways, with input from visual and prefrontal regions. Importantly, when stimuli were nondegraded and processed fast, the optimal stop model contained additional connections from prefrontal to visual cortex. Individual differences analysis revealed that stronger prefrontal-to-visual connectivity covaried with faster inhibition times. Therefore, prefrontal-to-visual cortex connections appear to suppress the fast flow of visual input for the go task, such that the inhibition process can finish before the selection process. These results indicate response selection and inhibition within the BG to emerge through the interplay of top–down adjustments from prefrontal and bottom–up input from sensory cortex.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 539-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Véronique Paban ◽  
Julien Modolo ◽  
Ahmad Mheich ◽  
Mahmoud Hassan

We aimed at identifying the potential relationship between the dynamical properties of the human functional network at rest and one of the most prominent traits of personality, namely resilience. To tackle this issue, we used resting-state EEG data recorded from 45 healthy subjects. Resilience was quantified using the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). By using a sliding windows approach, brain networks in each EEG frequency band (delta, theta, alpha, and beta) were constructed using the EEG source-space connectivity method. Brain networks dynamics were evaluated using the network flexibility, linked with the tendency of a given node to change its modular affiliation over time. The results revealed a negative correlation between the psychological resilience and the brain network flexibility for a limited number of brain regions within the delta, alpha, and beta bands. This study provides evidence that network flexibility, a metric of dynamic functional networks, is strongly correlated with psychological resilience as assessed from personality testing. Beyond this proof-of-principle that reliable EEG-based quantities representative of personality traits can be identified, this motivates further investigation regarding the full spectrum of personality aspects and their relationship with functional networks.


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