Brain spontaneous fluctuations in sensorimotor regions were directly related to eyes open and eyes closed: evidences from a machine learning approach

Previous studies have demonstrated that the difference between resting-state brain activations depends on whether the subject was eyes open (EO) or eyes closed (EC). However, whether the spontaneous fluctuations are directly related to these two different resting states are still largely unclear. In the present study, we acquired resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 24 healthy subjects (11 males, 20.17 ± 2.74 years) under the EO and EC states. The amplitude of the spontaneous brain activity in low-frequency band was subsequently investigated by using the metric of fractional amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (fALFF) for each subject under each state. A support vector machine (SVM) analysis was then applied to evaluate whether the category of resting states could be determined from the brain spontaneous fluctuations. We demonstrated that these two resting states could be decoded from the identified pattern of brain spontaneous fluctuations, predominantly based on fALFF in the sensorimotor module. Specifically, we observed prominent relationships between increased fALFF for EC and decreased fALFF for EO in sensorimotor regions. Overall, the present results indicate that a SVM performs well in the discrimination between the brain spontaneous fluctuations of distinct resting states and provide new insight into the neural substrate of the resting states during EC and EO.