Recurring Transient Brain-Wide Co-Activation Patterns from EEG Spatially Resembling Time-Averaged Resting-State Networks

It has long been established that human brains remain functionally active at rest, as demonstrated with the discovery of resting-state networks (RSNs) underlying spontaneous neural activity. Recent studies suggest that classical RSNs estimated from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data using time-domain functional connectivity measures might be driven by recurring point-process events. Due to the slow hemodynamic response, fMRI is not able to reveal such point-processes at the timescale of neuronal events while electroencephalography (EEG) holds the promise due to its millisecond temporal resolution and successful reconstruction of fMRI-like RSNs from EEG. The present study reported a set of recurring transient (<100 milliseconds) cortical co-activation patterns (CAPs) derived from resting-state EEG using a clustering algorithm with spatial-domain measures (i.e., k-means). Our results indicate that this set of CAPs exhibit strong spatial correspondence with known RSNs, not only those derived from the same EEG data using time-domain measures (i.e., independence), but also those from fMRI literature, covering visual, auditory, motor, limbic, high-order, and default mode networks. CAPs exhibit the properties of hemispheric symmetry, spatially separatable sub-systems, and intersubject variability gradient across functional systems, which have all been observed in classical RSNs. In terms of differences between CAPs and RSNs beyond their timescales, CAPs demonstrate greater intersubject reproducibility of spatial patterns compared to their time-averaged RSNs counterparts. These findings suggest that classical RSNs might be driven by recurring transient neuronal activations captured in CAPs. More importantly, CAPs can reveal much fast dynamics of such brain-wide networked neuronal activations (e.g., different CAPs exhibit significantly different occurrences and lifetimes) and benefit from their great intersubject reproducibility, thus underscoring their potential to advance our understanding on neuronal mechanisms of spontaneous large-scale brain activation phenomena.