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Reconstruction of behavior-relevant individual brain activity: an individualized fMRI study

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Abstract

Different patterns of brain activity are observed in various subjects across a wide functional domain. However, these individual differences, which are often neglected through the group average, are not yet completely understood. Based on the fundamental assumption that human behavior is rooted in the underlying brain function, we speculated that the individual differences in brain activity are reflected in the individual differences in behavior. Adopting 98 behavioral measures and assessing the brain activity induced at seven task functional magnetic resonance imaging states, we demonstrated that the individual differences in brain activity can be used to predict behavioral measures of individual subjects with high accuracy using the partial least square regression model. In addition, we revealed that behavior-relevant individual differences in brain activity transferred between different task states and can be used to reconstruct individual brain activity. Reconstructed individual brain activity retained certain individual differences which were lost in the group average and could serve as an individual functional localizer. Therefore, our results suggest that the individual differences in brain activity contain behavior-relevant information and should be included in group averaging. Moreover, reconstructed individual brain activity shows a potential use in precise and personalized medicine.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (91432302, 31620103905, 81501179). Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brainnetome Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Dongya Wu & Tianzi Jiang

  2. National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Dongya Wu & Tianzi Jiang

  3. CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Tianzi Jiang

  4. The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 625014, China

    Tianzi Jiang

  5. The Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Tianzi Jiang

  6. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Dongya Wu & Tianzi Jiang

  7. School of Mathematical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Xin Li

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  1. Dongya Wu
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  2. Xin Li
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Correspondence to Tianzi Jiang.

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Compliance and ethics The author(s) declare that they have no conflict of interest. The HCP project involving human subjects was approved by the ethical committee of NIH, and conformed with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (as revised in 2008) concerning Human Rights, and followed out policy concerning Informed Consent as shown on Springer.com.

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Wu, D., Li, X. & Jiang, T. Reconstruction of behavior-relevant individual brain activity: an individualized fMRI study. Sci. China Life Sci. 63, 410–418 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-019-9556-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-019-9556-4

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