Abstract
Understanding the critical features of the human brain at multiple time scales is vital for both normal development and disease research. A recently proposed method, the vertex-wise Index of Functional Criticality (vIFC) based on fMRI, has been testified as a sensitive neuroimaging marker to characterize critical transitions of human brain dynamics during Alzheimer’s disease progression. However, it remains unclear whether vIFC in healthy brains is associated with neuropsychological and neurophysiological measurements. Using the Nathan Kline Institute/Rockland lifespan cross-sectional datasets and openfMRI single participant longitudinal datasets, we found consistent spatial patterns of vIFC across the entire cortical mantle: the inferior parietal and the precuneus exhibited high vIFC. On a time scale of years, we observed that vIFC increased with age in the left ventral posterior cingulate gyrus. On a time scale of days and weeks, vIFC demonstrated the capacity to identify a link between anxiety and pulse. These results showed that vIFC can serve as a useful neuroimaging marker for detecting physiological, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental transitions. Based on the criticality theory in nonlinear dynamics, the current vIFC study sheds new light on human brain studies from a nonlinear perspective and opens potential new avenues for normal and abnormal human brain studies.
Highlights
The human brain is one of the most complicated dynamical systems
Using 442 lifespan cross-sectional images and a single participant longitudinal dataset, we found stable spatial patterns of vertex-wise Index of Functional Criticality (vIFC) across the entire cortical mantle: the inferior parietal lobule and the precuneus exhibited high vIFC
On a time scale of days and weeks, vIFC demonstrated the capacity to identify links between anxiety and the pulse of a single participant over an 18-month period (N = 82 scans). These results suggest that vIFC can serve as an efficient neuroimaging marker for detecting physiological, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental transitions
Summary
The human brain is one of the most complicated dynamical systems. It varies at multiple temporal and spatial scales, from milliseconds and microns in neuron firing to seconds and centimeters in functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygen level-dependent time series of brain regions and even to days, weeks, months and years during lifespan development. Criticality is a state of being scale-free and may accommodate this multiscale phenomenon in the human brain. There have been studies showing that the human brain works near criticality to accomplish the transitions of task states [1,2,3,4]. Is there any critical transition or abrupt change in human brain dynamics at some spatiotemporal scale that may indicate.
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