Anna Leigh Rack-Gomer1, Joy Liau1, Thomas T. Liu1,2
1Bioengineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA; 2Radiology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
A growing number of fMRI studies have used measures of resting-state BOLD functional connectivity for the study of cognitive disease. However, the interpretation of differences in connectivity measures is complicated by the dependence of the BOLD signal on both neural and vascular factors. In this study we show that resting-state BOLD connectivity measures exhibit an inverse dependence on baseline CBF in the motor cortex. These results suggest that inter-subject differences in baseline CBF may explain a large part of the inter-subject variance in functional connectivity measurements.