Moment to moment variability and sensitivity in functional and structural brain images

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Abstract

The human brain is remarkably dynamic and enables us to rapidly face demands and emotions in an ever-changing environment. However, researchers commonly calculate averaged neural responses across time and disregard moment-to-moment variability as noise. At the same time, conventional neuroimaging measures suffer low test-retest reliability, and replications across studies are still unsatisfactory. In this talk, I will present both functional and structural MRI data and provide examples of adaptive and rapid brain fluctuations in psychiatric and healthy individuals: First, Moment-to-moment variability in socio-emotional related BOLD response is a reliable predictor of social anxiety disordered patients’ treatment outcome (1); Second, brain morphology measures are sensitive to individuals’ mental states and demonstrate task-related “volumetric” changes in less than two minutes (2, 3). I will discuss relevant literature and implications for the future. If variability in the BOLD signal represents an adaptive brain response, how much scanning time is needed to capture reliable activity, and what is sufficient to predict relevant behavior? I will also demonstrate predictive performance differences between resting-state and task-based fMRI. Finally, I will discuss the implications of structural scans (e.g., T1-weighted MRI) being sensitive to what individuals are doing while they are being scanned.

References

Månsson, K. N. T., Waschke, L., Manzouri, A., Furmark, T., Fischer, H., & Garrett, D. D. (2021). Moment-to-Moment Brain Signal Variability Reliably Predicts Psychiatric Treatment Outcome. Biological Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.09.026

Månsson, K. N. T., Cortes, D. S., Manzouri, A., Li, TQ., Hau, S., & Fischer, H. (2020). Viewing Pictures Triggers Rapid Morphological Enlargement in the Human Visual Cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 30(3), 851–857. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhz131

Olivo, G., Lövdén, M., Manzouri, A., Terlau, L., Jenner, B., Jafari, A., Petersson, S., Li TQ., Fischer, H., Månsson, K. N. T. (2022) Estimated Gray Matter Volume Rapidly Changes after a Short Motor Task. Cerebral Cortex, In press.