Functional Connectome Fingerprinting

Principal Investigator: Dr. Jason Druzgal, UVa Dept. of Radiology

Previous research has found that individuals can be identified by their functional connectome: a map showing how different regions of their brain are connected. Finn et al achieved 93% accuracy when identifying 126 subjects using high-res resting state functional MRI scans acquired over two days¹. Researchers from the UVa Functional Neuroradiology Lab sought to answer two questions:

1. Are the characteristics of an individual’s functional connectome durable over several months, as opposed to over two days?

2. Do the unique characteristics of an individual’s functional connectome persist in lower resolution data more commonly obtained in a clinical setting?

My main contributions to this project were:

• Programming analyses and visualizing results in MATLAB

• Writing bash scripts to run our pipeline on UVa’s HPC system

References

1. Finn, E. S., Shen, X., Scheinost, D., Rosenberg, M. D., Huang, J., Chun, M. M., Papademetris, X. & Constable, R. T. (2015). Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity. Nature neuroscience, 18(11), 1664.