The flagship journal in the field of neuroimaging methodology, NeuroImage, announcedits top hottest 25 articles in the fourth quarter of the year 2012 [1]. The test-retest (TRT) reliability study on regional homogeneity (ReHo) of human brain function, conducted by Zuo’s group and his collaborators [2], becomes one of these 25hottest articles with a rank of 7. They performed a comprehensiveexamination on multiple factors that affect ReHo’s TRT reliability, and proposed a highly reliable pipeline for its computational implementation – Connectome Computation System (CCS: http://lfcd.psych.ac.cn/ccs.html). In this study,thecutting-edge multiband gradient echo imaging, at the first time, was employed to acquire the TRT resting-state MRI images for evaluating the reliability of ReHo.We found it can significantly improve the reliability of R-fMRI computing. Thiskind of sequences has become one of the standard imaging sequences used in the Human Connectome Project. The senior author of this work, Professor Xi-Nian Zuo, has been invited to present these findings and give a talk in the Brain Mapping Unit Networks Meeting and the Cambridge Connectome Consortium at Cambridge University in early November 2012 [3].
The functional connectomics based on R-fMRI technique have gradually become a powerful tool for the systematically examining human brain function. However, compared with the human genomics, an international standard on data acquisition or data processing is lacking. Meanwhile, researchers have developed various computational methods to characterize different features of the human brain function. Therefore, it becomes challenges how to select an appropriate calculation method and index for the researchers in their applications. TRT reliability canserve as a criterion for such decisions regarding that higher TRT reliability reflects high temporal stability and good performance indetecting individual differences. The laboratory for functional connectome and development (http://lfcd.psych.ac.cn) led by Dr. Zuo devotes long-term efforts to assessment of the TRT reliability of a variety of human brain functional connectome metrics, and proposed various metrics to improve the TRT reliability of mapping the functional connectome.
The current study represents an international effort on pushing the functional connectomics forward withthe cooperation amongthe Institute of PsychologyoftheChineseAcademyofSciences, the Center for Cognition andBrain Disorders of Hangzhou Normal University, the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning of Beijing Normal University, theSchool of Medicine of New YorkUniversity andChild MindInstitute. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81220108014, 81171409, 81030028) the Open Research Fund of the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science and the Startup Foundation for Distinguished Research Professor (Y0CX492S03) of the Instituteof Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences as well as R01MH083246 from NIMH.
[1] Top 25 Hottest Articles: http://top25.sciencedirect.com/subject/neuroscience/18/journal/neuroimage/10538119/archive/41
[2] Zuo XN*, Xu T, Jiang L, Cao XY, Yang Z, He Y, Zang YF, Castellanos FX, Milham MP. Toward reliable characterization of functional homogeneity in the human brain: Preprocessing, scan duration, imaging resolution and computational space. NeuroImage.2013; 65(2): 374-386.
[3] Talk@Cambridge:
http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/41233
