On the relationship between instantaneous phase synchrony and correlation-based sliding windows for time-resolved fMRI connectivity analysis

Correlation-based sliding window analysis (CSWA) is the most commonly used method to estimate time-resolved functional MRI (fMRI) connectivity. However, instantaneous phase synchrony analysis (IPSA) is gaining popularity mainly because it offers single time-point resolution of time-resolved fMRI connectivity. We aim to provide a systematic comparison between these two approaches, on temporal, topological and anatomical levels. For this purpose, we used resting-state fMRI data from two separate cohorts with different temporal resolutions (45 healthy subjects from Human Connectome Project fMRI data with repetition time of 0.72 s and 25 healthy subjects from a separate validation fMRI dataset with a repetition time of 3 s). For time-resolved functional connectivity analysis, we calculated tapered CSWA over a wide range of different window lengths that were compared to IPSA. We found a strong association in connectivity dynamics between IPSA and CSWA when considering the absolute values of CSWA. The association between CSWA and IPSA was stronger for a window length of similar to 20s (shorter than filtered fMRI wavelength) than similar to 100 s (longer than filtered fMRI wavelength), irrespective of the sampling rate of the underlying fMRI data. Narrow-band filtering of fMRI data (0.03-0.07 Hz) yielded a stronger relationship between IPSA and CSWA than wider-band (0.01-0.1 Hz). On a topological level, time-averaged IPSA and CSWA nodes were non-linearly correlated for both short (similar to 20 s) and long (similar to 100 s) windows, mainly because nodes with strong negative correlations (CSWA) displayed high phase synchrony (IPSA). IPSA and CSWA were anatomically similar in the default mode network, sensory cortex, insula and cerebellum. Our results suggest that IPSA and CSWA provide comparable characterizations of time-resolved fMRI connectivity for appropriately chosen window lengths. Although IPSA requires narrow-band fMRI filtering, it does not mandate a (semi-)arbitrary choice of window length and window overlap. A code for calculating IPSA is provided.