Back

Markov Spatial Flows in BOLD fMRI: a Novel Lens on the BOLD Signal Reveals Attracting Patterns of Signal Intensity

Miller, R. L.; Vergara, V. M.; Erhardt, E. B.; Calhoun, V.

2023-12-15 neuroscience
10.1101/2023.12.15.571860 bioRxiv
Show abstract

While the analysis of temporal signal fluctuations and cofluctuations has long been a fixture of blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research, the role and implications of spatial propagation within the 4D neurovascular BOLD signal has been almost entirely neglected. As part of a larger research program aimed at capturing and analyzing spatially propagative dynamics in BOLD fMRI, we report here a method that exposes large-scale functional attractors of spatial flows formulated as Markov processes defined at the voxel level. The brainwide stationary distributions of these voxel-level Markov processes represent patterns of signal accumulation toward which we find evidence that the brain exerts a probabilistic propagative undertow. These probabilistic propagative attractors are spatially structured and organized interpretably over functional regions. They also differ significantly between schizophrenia patients and controls.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.