Neuronal Origin of the Temporal Dynamics of Spontaneous BOLD Activity Correlation

Resting-state functional connectivity (FC) has become a major functional magnetic resonance imaging method to study network organization of human brains. There has been recent interest in the temporal fluctuations of FC calculated using short time windows ("dynamic FC") because this method could provide information inaccessible with conventional "static" FC, which is typically calculated using the entire scan lasting several tens of minutes. Although multiple studies have revealed considerable temporal fluctuations in FC, it is still unclear whether the fluctuations of FC measured in hemodynamics reflect the dynamics of underlying neural activity. We addressed this question using simultaneous imaging of neuronal calcium and hemodynamic signals in mice and found coordinated temporal dynamics of calcium FC and hemodynamic FC measured in the same short time windows. Moreover, we found that variation in transient neuronal coactivation patterns was significantly related to temporal fluctuations of sliding window FC in hemodynamics. Finally, we show that the observed dynamics of FC cannot be fully accounted for by simulated data assuming stationary FC. These results provide evidence for the neuronal origin of dynamic FC and further suggest that information relevant to FC is condensed in temporally sparse events that can be extracted using a small number of time points.