Hub Patterns-Based Detection of Dynamic Functional Network Metastates in Resting State: A Test-Retest Analysis

The spontaneous dynamic characteristics of resting-state functional networks contain much internal brain physiological or pathological information. The metastate analysis of brain functional networks is an effective technique to quantify the essence of brain functional connectome dynamics. However, the widely used functional connectivity-based metastate analysis ignored the topological structure, which could be locally reflected by node centrality. In this study, 23 healthy young volunteers (21–26 years) were recruited and scanned twice with a 1-week interval. Based on the time sequences of node centrality, we promoted a node centrality-based clustering method to find metastates of functional connectome and conducted a test-retest experiment to assess the stability of those identified metastates using the described method. The hub regions of metastates were further compared with the structural networks’ organization to depict its potential relationship with brain structure. Results of extracted metastates showed repeatable dynamic features between repeated scans and high overlapping rate of hub regions with brain intrinsic sub-networks. These identified hub patterns from metastates further highly overlapped with the structural hub regions. These findings indicated that the proposed node centrality-based metastates detection method could reveal reliable and meaningful metastates of spontaneous dynamics and indicate the underlying nature of brain dynamics as well as the potential relationship between these dynamics and the organization of the brain connectome.