On the Relationship between MRI and Local Field Potential Measurements of Spatial and Temporal Variations in Functional Connectivity

Correlations between fluctuations in resting state BOLD fMRI signals are interpreted as measures of functional connectivity (FC), but the neural basis of their origins and their relationships to specific features of underlying electrophysiologic activity, have not been fully established. In particular, the dependence of FC metrics on different frequency bands of local field potentials (LFPs), and the relationship of dynamic changes in BOLD FC to underlying temporal variations of LFP correlations, are not known. We compared the spatial profiles of resting state coherences of different frequency bands of LFP signals, with high resolution resting state BOLD FC measurements. We also compared the probability distributions of temporal variations of connectivity in both modalities using a Markov chain model-based approach. We analyzed data obtained from the primary somatosensory (S1) cortex of monkeys. We found that in areas 3b and 1 of S1 cortex, low frequency LFP signal fluctuations were the main contributions to resting state LFP coherence. Additionally, the dynamic changes of BOLD FC behaved most similarly to the LFP low frequency signal coherence. These results indicate that, within the S1 cortex meso-scale circuit studied, resting state FC measures from BOLD fMRI mainly reflect contributions from low frequency LFP signals and their dynamic changes.