A Mixed Model Approach for Estimating Regional Functional Connectivity from Voxel-level BOLD Signals

Abstract

Resting-state brain functional connectivity quantifies the synchrony between activity patterns of different brain regions. In functional magnetic resonance imaging, each region comprises a set of spatially contiguous voxels at which blood-oxygen-level-dependent signals are acquired. The ubiquitous Correlation of Averages (CA) estimator, and other similar metrics, are computed from spatially aggregated signals within each region, and remain the quantifications of inter-regional connectivity most used by neuroscientists. Their popularity is primarily due to computational simplicity despite their demonstrable bias and lack of statistically principled justification. By leveraging linear mixed-effects models, both inter-regional and intra-regional correlation and measurement error can be explicitly modeled as signal variability sources. A novel computational pipeline, focused on subject-level inter-regional correlation parameters of interest, is developed to address the challenges of applying maximum likelihood estimation to such structured, high-dimensional spatiotemporal data. Simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed estimator relative to CA in terms of both decreased bias and accurate confidence interval coverage across simulation settings. The proposed method is also applied to construct individual human brain networks for subjects from a Human Connectome Project test-retest database. Concordances between inter-regional correlation estimates demonstrate the potentially substantial scientific benefits of the proposed approach that reliably produces more consistent results than CA for test-retest scans of the same subject.