Individual Variability and Test-Retest Reliability Revealed by Ten Repeated Resting-State Brain Scans over One Month

PLoS One. 2015 Dec 29;10(12):e0144963. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144963. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Individual differences in mind and behavior are believed to reflect the functional variability of the human brain. Due to the lack of a large-scale longitudinal dataset, the full landscape of variability within and between individual functional connectomes is largely unknown. We collected 300 resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI) datasets from 30 healthy participants who were scanned every three days for one month. With these data, both intra- and inter-individual variability of six common rfMRI metrics, as well as their test-retest reliability, were estimated across multiple spatial scales. Global metrics were more dynamic than local regional metrics. Cognitive components involving working memory, inhibition, attention, language and related neural networks exhibited high intra-individual variability. In contrast, inter-individual variability demonstrated a more complex picture across the multiple scales of metrics. Limbic, default, frontoparietal and visual networks and their related cognitive components were more differentiable than somatomotor and attention networks across the participants. Analyzing both intra- and inter-individual variability revealed a set of high-resolution maps on test-retest reliability of the multi-scale connectomic metrics. These findings represent the first collection of individual differences in multi-scale and multi-metric characterization of the human functional connectomes in-vivo, serving as normal references for the field to guide the use of common functional metrics in rfMRI-based applications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Cognition
  • Connectome
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging*
  • Male
  • Nerve Net / physiology
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Rest / physiology*
  • Spatial Analysis
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the National Key Basic Research and Development (973) Program (2015CB351702, X-NZ), the Major Joint Fund for International Cooperation and Exchange of the National Natural Science Foundation (81220108014, X-NZ), the Hundred Talents Program and the Key Research Program (KSZD-EW-TZ-002, X-NZ) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Natural Science Foundation of China (31070905, 31371134, 81171409 and 81471740) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (11AZD119).