Network Connectivity Modeling of Heterogeneous Brain Data to Examine Ensembles of Activity Across Two Levels of Dimensionality

Functional MRI (fMRI) is currently the most ubiquitous imaging technique for measuring whole brain activity in humans. The usefulness of fMRI in both research and clinical settings, however, has been limited by the availability of computational tools for analyzing the data. Most tools allow researchers to track activity in brain regions within a known network, without the ability to simultaneously examine connections between various networks. Gates and her colleagues have proposed a set of software tools that enable the simultaneous analysis of within- and between-network connectivity. The tools will also make it easier to combine fMRI data across individuals in order to learn more about how whole brain activity differs across people in both health and disease.