Abstract

Dynamic resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) characterizes fluctuations that occur over time in functional brain networks. Existing methods to extract dynamic RSFCs include sliding-window and clustering methods with various limitations due to its inherent non-adaptive nature and high-dimensionality including an inability to reconstruct brain signals, insufficiency of data for reliable estimation, insensitiv-ity to rapid changes in dynamics, and a lack of generalizability across multi-modal functional imaging datasets. To overcome these deficiencies, we develop a novel and unifying time-varying dynamic network (TVDN) framework for examining dynamic resting state functional connectivity. TVDN includes a generative model that de- scribes the relation between low-dimensional dynamic RSFC and the brain signals, and an inference algorithm that automatically and adaptively learns to detect dy- namic state transitions in data and a low-dimensional manifold of dynamic RSFC. TVDN is generalizable to handle multimodal functional neuroimaging data (fMRI and MEG/EEG). The resulting estimated low-dimensional dynamic RSFCs manifold directly link to the brain signal frequencies and we can evaluate TVDN performance by examining whether learnt features can reconstruct observed brain signals. We conduct comprehensive simulations to evaluate TVDN under hypothetical settings. We then demonstrate the application of TVDN with real fMRI and MEG data, and compare the results with the existing benchmarks. Results demonstrate that TVDN is able to more robustly detect brain state switching both in resting state fMRI and MEG data.

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