Reliability of functional connectivity in resting-state functional MRI

Abstract

Functional MRI is a noninvasive method in brain imaging. Localization, classification, prediction and connectivity are the most common issues. Functional connectivity is a branch of fMRI that focuses on connectivity between voxels and ROIs. There are several methods for investigating functional connectivity such as correlation analysis. In any field, it is very important that results of any research have reliability according to the experiment. Any methods and measurement instruments need to be reliable. Without reliability, results are meaningless and our research is not trustworthy. Brain imaging can be used as a valuable tool for pre-surgical planning, so the results should be highly reproducible. Test-retest reliability can be explored using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). I2C2 is an extent of ICC to verify the reliability in high-dimensional data as imaging studies. 13 subjects of test-retest resting-state fMRI are used to investigate reliability. I2C2 of four ROIs are also computed (Caudate, Cingulate, Cuneus and Precentral regions). Functional connectivity is found to have moderate reliability ranging 0.6244 to 0.6941. 95% confidence interval of I2C2 is calculated by nonparametric bootstrap in which CI of Caudate region I2C2 has the shortest length.