Hybrid ICA-Seed-Based Methods for fMRI Functional Connectivity Assessment : A Feasibility Study

Abstract EN

Brain functional connectivity (FC) is often assessed from fMRI data using seed-based methods, such as those of detecting temporal correlation between a predefined region (seed) and all other regions in the brain; or using multivariate methods, such as independent component analysis (ICA).

ICA is a useful data-driven tool, but reproducibility issues complicate group inferences based on FC maps derived with ICA.

These reproducibility issues can be circumvented with hybrid methods that use information from ICA-derived spatial maps as seeds to produce seed-based FC maps.

We report results from five experiments to demonstrate the potential advantages of hybrid ICA-seed-based FC methods, comparing results from regressing fMRI data against task-related a priori time courses, with “back-reconstruction” from a group ICA, and with five hybrid ICA-seed-based FC methods: ROI-based with (1) single-voxel, (2) few-voxel, and (3) many-voxel seed; and dual-regression-based with (4) single ICA map and (5) multiple ICA map seed.