The individual functional connectome is unique and stable over months to years; we don't know if even from utero

The individual functional connectome is unique and stable over months to years. Corey Horien et al. NeuroImage, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.02.002

Highlights
•    Used 4 longitudinal datasets to generate functional connectivity matrices.
•    Whole-brain matrices are unique and stable across months to years.
•    Medial frontal and frontoparietal networks tended to be both unique and stable.
•    Edges in the frontal and parietal cortices tended to be most discriminative.

Abstract: Functional connectomes computed from fMRI provide a means to characterize individual differences in the patterns of BOLD synchronization across regions of the entire brain. Using four resting-state fMRI datasets with a wide range of ages, we show that individual differences of the functional connectome are stable across 3 months to 1–2 years (and even detectable at above-chance levels across 3 years). Medial frontal and frontoparietal networks appear to be both unique and stable, resulting in high ID rates, as did a combination of these two networks. We conduct analyses demonstrating that these results are not driven by head motion. We also show that edges contributing the most to a successful ID tend to connect nodes in the frontal and parietal cortices, while edges contributing the least tend to connect cross-hemispheric homologs. Our results demonstrate that the functional connectome is stable across years and that high ID rates are not an idiosyncratic aspect of a specific dataset, but rather reflect stable individual differences in the functional connectivity of the brain.