Unraveling reproducible dynamic states of individual brain functional parcellation

Data-driven parcellations are widely used for exploring the functional organization of the brain, and also for reducing the high dimensionality of fMRI data. Despite the flurry of methods proposed in the literature, functional brain parcellations are not highly reproducible at the level of individual subjects, even with very long acquisitions. Some brain areas are also more difficult to parcellate than others, with association heteromodal cortices being the most challenging. An important limitation of classical parcellations is that they are static, that is, they neglect dynamic reconfigurations of brain networks. In this paper, we proposed a new method to identify dynamic states of parcellations, which we hypothesized would improve reproducibility over static parcellation approaches. For a series of seed voxels in the brain, we applied a cluster analysis to regroup short (3 min) time windows into “states” with highly similar seed parcels. We split individual time series of the Midnight scan club sample into two independent sets of 2.5 hr (test and retest). We found that average within-state parcellations, called stability maps, were highly reproducible (over 0.9 test-retest spatial correlation in many instances) and subject specific (fingerprinting accuracy over 70% on average) between test and retest. Consistent with our hypothesis, seeds in heteromodal cortices (posterior and anterior cingulate) showed a richer repertoire of states than unimodal (visual) cortex. Taken together, our results indicate that static functional parcellations are incorrectly averaging well-defined and distinct dynamic states of brain parcellations. This work calls to revisit previous methods based on static parcellations, which includes the majority of published network analyses of fMRI data. Our method may, thus, impact how researchers model the rich interactions between brain networks in health and disease.