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A mathematical perspective on edge-centric brain functional connectivity

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Edge time series are increasingly used in brain imaging to study the node functional connectivity (nFC) dynamics at the finest temporal resolution while avoiding sliding windows. Here, we lay the mathematical foundations for the edge-centric analysis of neuroimaging time series, explaining why a few high-amplitude cofluctuations drive the nFC across datasets. Our exposition also constitutes a critique of the existing edge-centric studies, showing that their main findings can be derived from the nFC under a static null hypothesis that disregards temporal correlations. Testing the analytic predictions on functional MRI data from the Human Connectome Project confirms that the nFC can explain most variation in the edge FC matrix, the edge communities, the large cofluctuations, and the corresponding spatial patterns. We encourage the use of dynamic measures in future research, which exploit the temporal structure of the edge time series and cannot be replicated by static null models.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2693
Number of pages13
JournalNature Communications
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 May 2022

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