Joseph R Whittaker1, Molly G Bright1,2, Ian D Driver1, and Kevin Murphy1
1CUBRIC, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom, 2Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
A pilot study of fMRI time-frequency dynamics,
characterized using a maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform, demonstrates
matched frequency correlations with beat-to-beat mean arterial blood pressure fluctuations.
Voxel-wise correlations between fMRI and blood pressure wavelet coefficients,
on a frequency scale centred at 0.1Hz, reveal distributed and structured
spatial variance across the brain. We demonstrate that functional connectivity
methods that include time-frequency representations of fMRI data are likely
very sensitive to these blood pressure fluctuations.
