Collective Correlations of Brodmann Areas fMRI Study with RMT-Denoising

Abstract: We study collective behavior of Brodmann regions of human cerebral cortex using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Random Matrix Theory (RMT). The raw fMRI data is mapped onto the cortex regions corresponding to the Brodmann areas with the aid of the Talairach coordinates. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the Pearson correlation matrix for 41 different Brodmann regions is carried out to determine their collective activity in the idle state and in the active state stimulated by tapping. The collective brain activity is identified through the statistical analysis of the eigenvectors to the largest eigenvalues of the Pearson correlation matrix. The leading eigenvectors have a large participation ratio. This indicates that several Broadmann regions collectively give rise to the brain activity associated with these eigenvectors. We apply random matrix theory to interpret the underlying multivariate data.