Individual Topological Analysis of Synchronization-Based Brain Connectivity

Functional connectivity analysis aims at assessing the strength of functional coupling between the signal responses in distinct brain areas. Usually, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series connections are estimated through zero-lag correlation metrics that quantify the statistical similarity between pairs of regions or spectral measures that assess synchronization at a frequency band of interest. Here, we explored the application of a new metric to assess the functional synchronization in phase space between fMRI time series in a resting state. We applied a complete topological analysis to the resulting connectivity matrix to uncover both the macro-scale organization of the brain and detect the most important nodes. The synchronization metric is also compared with Pearson's correlation coefficient and spectral coherence to highlight similarities and differences between the topologies of the three functional networks. We found that the individual topological organization of the resulting synchronization-based connectivity networks shows a finer modular organization than that identified with the other two metrics and a low overlap with the modular partitions of the other two networks suggesting that the derived topological information is not redundant and could be potentially integrated to provide a multi-scale description of functional connectivity.