Spatial Dynamic Functional Connectivity Analysis Identifies Distinctive Biomarkers in Schizophrenia

Dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) analysis is a widely-used to study associations between dynamic functional correlations and cognitive abilities. Traditional methods analyze time-varying association of different spatial networks while assuming that the spatial network itself is stationary. However, there has been very little work focused on voxelwise spatial variability. Exploiting the variability across both the temporal and spatial domains provide a more promising direction to obtain reliable dynamic functional patterns. However, methods for extracting time-varying spatio-temporal patterns from large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data present some challenges, such as degradation in performance with respect to increase in size of the data, estimation of the number of dynamic components, and the potential sensitivity of the resulting dFNCs to selection of the networks. In this work, we implement subsequent extraction of exemplars and dynamics using a constrained independent vector analysis, a data-driven method that efficiently estimates spatial and temporal dynamics from large-scale resting-state fMRI data. We explore the benefits of analyzing spatial dFNC (sdFNC) patterns over temporal dFNC (tdFNC) patterns in the context of differentiating healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia. Our results indicate that for resting-state fMRI data, sdFNC patterns were able to better classify patients and controls, and yield more distinguishing features compared with tdFNC patterns. We also estimate structured patterns of connectivity/states using sdFNC patterns, an area that has not been studied so far, and observe that sdFNC was able to successfully capture distinct information from healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia. In addition, sdFNC patterns were also able to identify functional patterns that associate with signs of paranoia and abnormalities in the patients group. We also observe that patients with schizophrenia tend to switch to or stay in a state corresponding to a hyperconnected brain network.