The Subject Discriminability Based On Multisession Or Multitask Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Most previous studies investigated functional brain networks at the group level but overlooked the differences among individuals.To gain a better understanding of the individual brain,the concept of personalized neuroscience emerged,aiming to investigate and exploit individual differences in brains.The possibility of subject discriminability based on whole-brain functional connectivity(FC)has been demonstrated.To extract more accurate “fingerprint”encoded in FC,we speculated that the indirect effects in FC might be unfavorable information for subject discriminability,then the remaining component of FC(referred as direct FC(d FC))may constitute a better “fingerprint.”We adopted the silencing method to infer d FC from experimentally accessible FC and explained the superiority of d FC in subject discriminability from the perspective of test-retest reliability.We showed that the subject discriminability of d FC(even with much shorter f MRI data)is significantly greater than that of FC(calculated from the whole available f MRI data)in three public datasets.Furthermore,we elucidated that the silencing method improved subject discriminability by increasing the testretest reliability of reliable edges(i.e.,edges with high intra-class correlation coefficient)and the reliable edges dominated the subject discriminability of functional brain networks.After silencing,the reliable edges were distributed throughout the brain,especially in the Fronto-parietal Task Control,Salience,Ventral Attention,and Dorsal Attention subnetworks.Finally,the subject discriminability of functional brain networks calculated from taskf MRI data outperformed that calculated from resting-state f MRI data,and the silencing method could significantly improve the subject discriminability of each task-f MRI data,respectively.These results demonstrated that the d FC estimated by the silencing method from FC might constitute an accurate“fingerprint”for subject discriminability.This study made a step forward to the personalized neuroscience with f MRI-based brain “fingerprint.”...