Prefiltering based on experimental paradigm for analysis of fMRI complex brain networks

PLoS One. 2020 Oct 14;15(10):e0238994. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238994. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Brain networks offers a new insight about connections between function and anatomical regions of human brain. We present results from brain networks built from functional magnetic resonance images during finger tapping paradigm. Pearson voxel-voxel correlation in time and frequency domains were performed for all subjects. Besides this standard framework we have implemented a new approach consisting in filtering the data with respect to the fMRI paradigm (finger tapping) in order to obtain a better understanding of the network involved in the execution of the task. The main topological graph measures have been compared in both cases: voxel-voxel correlation and voxel-paradigm filtering plus voxel-voxel correlation. With the standard voxel-voxel correlation a clearly free-scale network was obtained. On the other hand, when we prefiltered the paradigm we obtained two different kind of networks: 1) free-scale; 2) random-like. To our best knowledge, this behaviour is reported here for first time for brain networks. We suggest that paradigm signal prefiltering can provide more infomation about the brain networks.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain / diagnostic imaging*
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Brain Mapping / methods*
  • Brain Mapping / statistics & numerical data
  • Connectome / methods
  • Connectome / statistics & numerical data
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / statistics & numerical data
  • Male
  • Nerve Net / diagnostic imaging
  • Nerve Net / physiology
  • Oxygen / blood
  • Psychomotor Performance / physiology

Substances

  • Oxygen

Grants and funding

CA is supported by MINECO/FEDER, under grant PGC2018-095895-B-I00. Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital. https:\\www.mineco.gob.es. SJ is partially supported by MINECO under grant MTM2015-67396-P. Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital. https:\\www.mineco.gob.es. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.