Matthew Jon Brookes1, Joanne Hale2,
Claire Stevenson2, Johanna Zumer2, Gareth Barnes3,
Julia Owen4, Susan Francis2, Srikantan Nagarajan4,
Peter Morris2
1Sir Peter Mansfield
Magnetic Resonance Centre , University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United
Kingdom; 2Sir Peter Mansfield Magnetic Resonance Centre,
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom; 3Wellcome
Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United
Kingdom; 4Biomagnetic Imaging Laboratory, University of California
San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
In this study we employ ultra high field (7T) functional connectivity (fc) MRI and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to explore, in detail, the electrophysiological basis of haemodynamic measures of functional connectivity. We show good agreement between motor cortex connectivity measured independently using these two disparate neuroimaging modalities. We employ three different MEG based functional connectivity metrics to investigate how neural oscillations mediate functional connectivity. Finally, we investigate the temporal dynamics of connectivity, showing that marked changes occur on a timescale accessible to fMRI. Our study has implications to those developing fcMRI methodologies, and to those employing fcMRI to understand functional connectivity.
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