Moreover, FcHo showed both similar and different whole brain distribution patterns compared to ReHo. These results were further supported by analyses of the nearest 18 and six neighbors and intra-subject similarity. FcHo mapping consistently revealed that the high FcHo was mainly distributed in association cortex including parietal lobe, frontal lobe, occipital lobe and default mode network (DMN) related areas, whereas the low FcHo was mainly found in unimodal cortex including primary visual cortex, sensorimotor cortex, paracentral lobule and supplementary motor area.
Finally, FcHo method was used to identify the differences of whole brain functional connectivity patterns between professional Chinese chess players and novices to test its application. We also compared FcHo distribution patterns with local regional homogeneity (ReHo) to identify the similarity and differences of the two methods. Furthermore, FcHo mapping results were further validated using the nearest 18 and six neighbors and intra-subject reproducibility with each subject scanned two times. The robustness of this method was tested in four independent datasets selected from a large repository of MRI. FcHo was defined by measuring the whole brain functional connectivity patterns similarity of a given voxel with its nearest 26 neighbors using Kendall’s coefficient concordance (KCC).
In this study, we introduced a new method called functional connectivity homogeneity (FcHo) to delineate the voxel-wise similarity of whole brain functional connectivity patterns.
However, how to characterize the voxel-wise similarity of whole brain functional connectivity pattern is still largely unknown. Mounting studies have demonstrated that brain functions are determined by its external functional connectivity patterns. 4College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.3Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.2School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.1The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.Lijie Wang 1,2, Jinping Xu 3, Chao Wang 4 and Jiaojian Wang 1,2*