Neurophysiological brain-fingerprints of motor and cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease

Brain-fingerprinting is a neuroimaging approach that is expanding the neuroscientific perspective on inter-individual diversity in health and disease. In the present study, we used brain-fingerprinting to advance the neurophysiological characterization of Parkinson's disease (PD). We derived the brain-fingerprints of patients with PD and age-matched healthy controls from the rhythmic and arhythmic spectral features of brief and task-free magnetoencephalography recordings. Using this approach, the individual differentiation of patients against healthy controls is 81% accurate, with the differentiability of patients scaling with the severity of their cognitive and motor symptoms. We show that between-patient differentiation is more challenging (77% accurate) than between healthy controls (90%) because the neurophysiological spectral features of patients with PD are less stable over time. The most distinctive features for differentiating healthy controls map to higher-order regions in the brain functional hierarchy. In contrast, the most distinctive features for patient differentiation map to the somatosensori-motor cortex. We also report that patient brain-fingerprints coincide with the cortical topography of the neurotransmitter systems affected in PD. We conclude that Parkinson’s disease affects the spectral brain-fingerprint of patients with remarkable heterogeneity between individuals, and increased variability over short periods of time, compared to age-matched healthy controls. Our study demonstrates the relevance of neurophysiological fingerprinting to clinical neuroscience, and highlights its potential in terms of patient stratification, disease modeling, and the development and evaluation of personalized interventions.