Yinan Liu1, Karl Young, 12, Yu Zhang, 12, Michael Weiner, 12, Norbert Schuff, 12
1Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, San Francisco, CA, United States; 2Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
We examined the value of transient information (TI), a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity that measures the uncertainty in synchronization, for characterizing functional connectivity in fMRI. Specifically, we used TI to capture the process of synchronization between two fMRI signals whose periodicity is initially unknown. We found that TI various markedly across the brain with e.g. posterior cingulate and precuneus synchronizing easier and faster with each other than with the putamen. These preliminary results suggest that TI may be a useful metric for quantifying functional connectivity.