Phase fMRI informs whole-brain function connectivity balance across lifespan with connection-specific aging effects during the resting state

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment produces complex-valued images consisting of pairwise magnitude and phase images. As different perspective on the same magnetic source, fMRI magnitude and phase data are complementary for brain function analysis. We collected 600-subject fMRI data during rest, decomposed via group-level independent component analysis (ICA) (mICA and pICA for magnitude and phase respectively), and calculated brain functional network connectivity matrices (mFC and pFC). The pFC matrix shows a fewer of significant connections balanced across positive and negative relationships. In comparison, the mFC matrix contains a positively-biased pattern with more significant connections. Our experiment data analyses also show that human brain maintains a whole-brain connection balance in resting state across an age span from 10 to 76 years, however, phase and magnitude data analyses reveal different connection-specific age effects on significant positive and negative subnetwork couplings.