Task-free MRI Predicts Individual Differences in Brain Activity During Task Performance

By I. Tavor, Oiwi Parker Jones, Rogier B. Mars, S. Smith, Timothy Edward John Behrens, Saâd Jbabdi. Science, 2016

741 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Every brain is different We all differ in how we perceive, think, and act. What drives individual differences in evoked brain activity? Tavor et al. applied computational models to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the Human Connectome Project. Brain activity in the “resting” state when subjects were not performing any explicit task predicted differences in fMRI activation across a range of cognitive paradigms. This suggests that individual differences in many cognitive tasks are a stable trait marker. Resting-state functional connectivity thus already contains the repertoire that is then expressed during task-based fMRI. Science, this issue p. 216 Brain activation when performing activities can largely be understood from its distinctive anatomy and connectivity. When asked to perform the same task, different individuals exhibit markedly different patterns of brain activity. This variability is often attributed to volatile factors, such as task strategy or compliance. We propose that individual differences in brain responses are, to a large degree, inherent to the brain and can be predicted from task-independent measurements collected at rest. Using a large set of task conditions, spanning several behavioral domains, we train a simple model that relates task-independent measurements to task activity and evaluate the model by predicting task activation maps for unseen subjects using magnetic resonance imaging. Our model can accurately predict individual differences in brain activity and highlights a coupling between brain connectivity and function that can be captured at the level of individual subjects.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8435770b802a770eb5efc98a0baadcad4affa12

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Citations in the corpus

Precision functional mapping of individual human brains (2017, positive): “Comparable observations were previously made on the basis of less extensively sampled data (Gordon et al., 2017b; Tavor et al., 2016; Sepulcre et al., 2012; Eickhoff et al., 2010).”
Functional brain networks are dominated by stable group and individual factors, not cognitive or daily variation (2018, background): “However, onemight have predicted that individual differences in network architecture would map onto individual differences in task activations (e.g., as shown in Gordon et al., 2017c; Smith et al., 2009; Tavor et al., 2016), and, thereby, task activations would also exhibit robust individual differe”
The Human Connectome Project’s Neuroimaging Approach (2016, background): “Tavor et al. 97 showed that a model r e v i e w relating task-independent (rfMRI) measurements to task activity can accurately predict task activation maps for unseen subjects, suggesting a coupling between brain connectivity and function at the level of individual subjects.”
Activity flow over resting-state networks shapes cognitive task activations (2016, methodology): “Beginning to fill this gap, several recent studies used abstract statistical models to predict cognitive task activations based on individual differences in large-scale connectivity 9,15,16 .”
The UNC/UMN Baby Connectome Project (BCP): An Overview of the Study Design and Protocol Development (2018, positive): “Indeed, the approach to acquisition and processing, and the quality of HCP and HCP-inspired data has advanced our knowledge of the structural and functional network architecture of the brain (Glasser et al., 2016b; Tavor et al., 2016).”
Frequency-specific maturation of cortical organization and social-cognitive links from childhood to adolescence (2025, unknown): “Intrinsic fMRI activity reflects a multilayered system of neural oscillations that support brain function even without tasks (Raichle, 2006; Fox & Raichle, 2007; Tavor et al., 2016).”