Predicting MEG resting-state functional connectivity from microstructural information

Understanding how human brain microstructure influences functional connectivity is an important endeavor. In this work, magnetic resonance imaging data from 90 healthy participants were used to calculate structural connectivity matrices using the streamline count, fractional anisotropy, radial diffusivity, and a myelin measure (derived from multicomponent relaxometry) to assign connection strength. Unweighted binarized structural connectivity matrices were also constructed. Magnetoencephalography resting-state data from those participants were used to calculate functional connectivity matrices, via correlations of the Hilbert envelopes of beamformer time series in the delta, theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands. Nonnegative matrix factorization was performed to identify the components of the functional connectivity. Shortest path length and search-information analyses of the structural connectomes were used to predict functional connectivity patterns for each participant. The microstructure-informed algorithms predicted the components of the functional connectivity more accurately than they predicted the total functional connectivity. This provides a methodology to understand functional mechanisms better. The shortest path length algorithm exhibited the highest prediction accuracy. Of the weights of the structural connectivity matrices, the streamline count and the myelin measure gave the most accurate predictions, while the fractional anisotropy performed poorly. Overall, different structural metrics paint very different pictures of the structural connectome and its relationship to functional connectivity. AUTHOR SUMMARY We use microstructural MRI and resting-state MEG data to investigate the relationship between the brain's structure and function. We construct functional brain networks by calculating correlations between the Hilbert envelope of the beamformer time series in different brain areas. Wealso construct structural brain networks using tractography, for five different edge weightings (number of streamlines, fractional anisotropy, myelination, radial diffusivity, and a binary weighting). Those structural networks are then used in function-predicting algorithms, and the predicted functional networks are compared to the measured ones. Weobserve that the shortest-path-length algorithm is better at predicting the observed patterns of functional connectivity, and that the number of streamlines and myelination are the edge weightings that lead to the highest correlations between the predicted and the observed functional connectivity.