Magnetoencephalography Dimensionality Reduction Informed by Dynamic Brain States

Complex spontaneous brain dynamics mirror the large number of interactions taking place among regions, supporting higher functions. Such complexity is manifested in the interregional dependencies among signals derived from different brain areas, as observed utilising neuroimaging techniques, like magnetoencephalography. The dynamics of this data produce numerous subsets of active regions at any moment as they evolve. Notably, converging evidence shows that these states can be understood in terms of transient coordinated events that spread across the brain over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Those can be used as a proxy of the 'effectiveness' of the dynamics, as they become stereotyped or disorganised in neurological diseases. However, given the high-dimensional nature of the data, representing them has been challenging thus far. Dimensionality reduction techniques are typically deployed to describe complex interdependencies and improve their interpretability. However, many dimensionality reduction techniques lose information about the sequence of configurations that took place. Here, we leverage a newly described algorithm, potential of heat-diffusion for affinity-based transition embedding (PHATE), specifically designed to preserve the dynamics of the system in the low-dimensional embedding space. We analysed source-reconstructed resting-state magnetoencephalography from 18 healthy subjects to represent the dynamics of the configuration in low-dimensional space. After reduction with PHATE, unsupervised clustering via K-means is applied to identify distinct clusters. The topography of the states is described, and the dynamics are represented as a transition matrix. All the results have been checked against null models, providing a parsimonious account of the large-scale, fast, aperiodic dynamics during resting-state. The study applies the PHATE algorithm to source-reconstructed magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, reducing dimensionality while preserving large-scale neural dynamics. Results reveal distinct configurations, or 'states', of brain activity, identified via unsupervised clustering. Their transitions are characterised by a transition matrix. This method offers a simplified yet rich view of complex brain interactions, opening new perspectives on large-scale brain dynamics in health and disease.