Differences in functional connectivity distribution after transcranial direct‐current stimulation: A connectivity density point of view

Abstract

In this manuscript, we consider the problem of relating functional connectivity measurements viewed as statistical distributions to outcomes. We demonstrate the utility of using the distribution of connectivity on a study of resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging association with an intervention. The method uses the estimated density of connectivity between nodes of interest as a functional covariate. Moreover, we demonstrate the utility of the procedure in an instance where connectivity is naturally considered an outcome by reversing the predictor/response relationship using case/control methodology. The method utilizes the density quantile, the density evaluated at empirical quantiles, instead of the empirical density directly. This improved the performance of the method by highlighting tail behavior, though we emphasize that by being flexible and non‐parametric, the technique can detect effects related to the central portion of the density. To demonstrate the method in an application, we consider 47 primary progressive aphasia patients with various levels of language abilities. These patients were randomly assigned to two treatment arms, transcranial direct‐current stimulation and language therapy versus sham (language therapy only), in a clinical trial. We use the method to analyze the effect of direct stimulation on functional connectivity. As such, we estimate the density of correlations among the regions of interest and study the difference in the density post‐intervention between treatment arms. We discover that it is the tail of the density, rather than the mean or lower order moments of the distribution, that demonstrates a significant impact in the classification. The new approach has several benefits. Among them, it drastically reduces the number of multiple comparisons compared with edge‐wise analysis. In addition, it allows for the investigation of the impact of functional connectivity on the outcomes where the connectivity is not geometrically localized.

Functional changes in sleep-related arousal after ketamine administration in individuals with treatment-resistant depression

“…Additionally, delta power findings in the present study were in line with previous findings of ketamine increasing slow wave activity in the first NREM episode [ 8 ]. Other areas of brain research have also supported the use of FDA, including studies using anatomic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional MRI measures [ 45 , 46 ]. Because our application of FDA in a study of drug effects on sleep EEG is novel, additional work is needed to replicate these findings in other datasets and treatments to determine whether the potential effects are ketamine-specific or represent a signature of antidepressant response to treatment.…”

Regression models for partially localized fMRI connectivity analyses

“…Since edge-at-a-time approaches distinguish each individual edge in the connectivity matrix, they can be described as making a full use of the associated location information for each edge (that is, which pair of brain regions the edge corresponds to). In contrast, in recent work, Tang et al (2023) treat all withinsubject edges as exchangeable. Their approach ignores the location information for each edge and instead characterizes subjects by the distribution (or histogram) of their edges.…”