TY - JOUR TI - Temporal transitions of spontaneous brain activity AU - Ma, Zhiwei AU - Zhang, Nanyin A2 - Ramirez, Jan-Marino VL - 7 PY - 2018 DA - 2018/03/08 SP - e33562 C1 - eLife 2018;7:e33562 DO - 10.7554/eLife.33562 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.33562 AB - Spontaneous brain activity, typically investigated using resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI), provides a measure of inter-areal resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). Although it has been established that RSFC is non-stationary, previous dynamic rsfMRI studies mainly focused on revealing the spatial characteristics of dynamic RSFC patterns, but the temporal relationship between these RSFC patterns remains elusive. Here we investigated the temporal organization of characteristic RSFC patterns in awake rats and humans. We found that transitions between RSFC patterns were not random but followed specific sequential orders. The organization of RSFC pattern transitions was further analyzed using graph theory, and pivotal RSFC patterns in transitions were identified. This study has demonstrated that spontaneous brain activity is not only nonrandom spatially, but also nonrandom temporally, and this feature is well conserved between rodents and humans. These results offer new insights into understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of spontaneous activity in the mammalian brain. KW - spontaneous brain activity KW - resting-state functional connectivity KW - awake rat KW - human KW - graph theory JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -