Resting-sate Brain FMRI Data Analyses

Brain functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) analyses is a hot point in the cognitive neuroscience area. Building a brain functional network is an important approach of the brain studies. The connectivity between the brain regions is measured by some form of statistical correlation. The popular statistical methods include correlation coefficient (CC), partial correlation coefficient (PCC), coherence (CH), wavelet correlation coefficient (WCC), and mutual information (MI). Maximum information coefficient (MIC), proposed recently, was called the correlation for the 21st century. However, different methods have different advantages. It is essential for comparison between these methods. In this thesis, the six methods were compared in terms of robustness.Rich club is a special phenomenon in the Complex Networks. Nowadays, researchers pay more attention to communities or collectives of brain regions, rather than separate entities. The brain function is the interaction of different regions in the brain, but not all regions contribute equally to the brain structure. A few region sets (so called the brain hubs) exhibit a strong tendency to link to each other, playing a key role of the global brain structure. Hence it is very important and significant to investigate the rich club phenomenon in the brain functional network. In this thesis we conducted tentative research of the rich club phenomenon. The thesis mainly contains three parts:1, Construct the brain functional network by maximum information coefficient (MIC), correlation coefficient (CC), partial correlation coefficient (PCC), coherence (CH), wavelet correlation coefficient (WCC), and mutual information (MI);2, In terms of robustness, the six methods were compared;3, Study the rich-club phenomenon in the brain functional network.The results revealed that MIC was an effective method to construct the brain functional network. There existed distinct rich-club phenomenon in the brain functional network. The brain hub was found containing the superior frontal cortex the cingulate cortex and the insula, which was consistent with existed results.