Dynamic Inter-subject Functional Connectivity Reveals Moment-to-Moment Brain Network Configurations Driven by Continuous or Communication Paradigms

Abstract

Task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging bears great potential to understand how our brain reacts to various types of stimulation; however, this is often achieved without considering the dynamic facet of functional processing, and analytical outputs typically account for merged influences of task-driven effects and underlying spontaneous fluctuations of brain activity. Here, we introduce a novel methodological pipeline that can go beyond these limitations: the use of a sliding-window analytical scheme permits tracking of functional changes over time, and through cross-subject correlational measurements, the approach can isolate purely stimulus-related effects. Thanks to a rigorous thresholding process, significant changes in inter-subject functional correlation can be extracted and analyzed. On a set of healthy subjects who underwent naturalistic audiovisual stimulation, we demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by tying the unraveled functional reconfigurations to particular cues of the movie. We show how, through our method, one can capture either a temporal profile of brain activity (the evolution of a given connection), or focus on a spatial snapshot at a key time point. We provide a publicly available version of the whole pipeline, and describe its use and the influence of its key parameters step by step.

Questions and controversies in the study of time-varying functional connectivity in resting fMRI

“…The naturalistic stimuli and intersubject correlation paradigm can be extended beyond single brain regions to estimate patterns of interregional FC that show synchronized fluctuations across individuals (intersubject functional connectivity). A growing number of studies have observed synchronized fluctuations in TVFC as participants watch a movie or listen to a story (Betzel, Byrge, Esfahlani, & Kennedy, 2019;Bolton, Jochaut, Giraud, & Van De Ville, 2019;Manning et al, 2018;Simony et al, 2016), and that these fluctuations can be reliably tied to narrative elements of the story (Betzel et al, 2019;Manning et al, 2018;Simony et al, 2016). These data provide further evidence that TVFC methods can reveal subtle fluctuations in cognitive state and suggest that variation in ongoing cognitive processes during task-free conditions can modulate the temporal structure of FC.…”

Movie Events Detecting Reveals Inter-Subject Synchrony Difference of Functional Brain Activity in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Recently, the dynamic inter-Subject analysis is an emerging frontier in naturalistic paradigms ( Bolton et al, 2018 , 2020 ; Yang et al, 2020 ). Dynamic ISFC tracks whole-brain functional connectivity changes over time in each sliding time window, so we can establish a relationship between movie cues and time-varying brain connectivity ( Bolton et al, 2019 ).…”

Investigation of functional brain network reconfiguration during exposure to naturalistic stimuli using graph-theoretical analysis

“…Kim et al further confirmed the effectiveness of the ISFC method in eliminating intrinsic neural signals on the whole-brain scale (Kim et al 2018). Moreover, research by Bolton et al on depression confirmed that the dynamic ISFC method has the potential to capture the dynamic FC of a stimulus lock shared between subjects (Bolton et al 2018(Bolton et al , 2019. The application of ISFC allows us to focus on the topological properties of dynamic FC networks induced only by naturalistic stimuli.…”