Amplitude differences in high-frequency fMRI signals between eyes open and eyes closed resting states

Recent studies employing rapid sampling techniques have demonstrated that the resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) signal exhibits synchronized activities at frequencies much higher than the conventional frequency range (<0.1 Hz). However, little work has investigated the changes in the high-frequency fluctuations between different resting states. Here, we acquired rs-fMRI data at a high sampling rate (TR = 400 ms) from subjects with both eyes open (EO) and eyes closed (EC), and compared the amplitude of fluctuation (AF) between EO and EC for both the low- and high-frequency components. In addition to robust AF differences in the conventional low frequency band (<0.1 Hz) in visual cortex, primary auditory cortex and primary sensorimotor cortex (PSMC), we also detected high-frequency (primarily in 0.1–0.35 Hz) differences. The high-frequency results without covariates regression exhibited noisy patterns. For the data with nuisance covariates regression, we found a significant and reproducible reduction in high-frequency AF between EO and EC in the bilateral PSMC and the supplementary motor area (SMA), and an increase in high-frequency AF in the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG). Furthermore, we investigated the effect of sampling rate by down-sampling the data to effective TR = 2 s. Briefly, by using the rapid sampling rate, we were able to detect more regions with significant differences while identifying fewer artifactual differences in the high-frequency bands as compared to the down-sampled dataset. We concluded that (1) high-frequency fluctuations of rs-fMRI signals can be modulated by different resting states and thus may be of physiological importance; and (2) the regression of covariates and the use of fast sampling rates are superior for revealing high-frequency differences in rs-fMRI signals.