Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) is a cornerstone of human brain research, yet its interpretation is complicated by its sensitivity to the slow hemodynamic response that obscures the organization of neural activity across faster time scales. Here we use simultaneous wide-field optical imaging (WOI) and rs-fMRI to directly examine the relationship between neural and hemodynamic functional connectomes across time scales. We show that much of the large-scale spatial structure is preserved across modalities, across time scales, and across frequencies. Although rs-fMRI robustly captures time-averaged neural activity, time-resolved rs-fMRI estimates of functional connectivity exhibit significantly greater variability, which partially reflects sensitivity limitations. Hemodynamic WOI signals maintain greater similarity to neural activity than rs-fMRI, although their fidelity is reduced at high frequencies. Together, our findings demonstrate that the time-averaged spatial structure of neural activity is faithfully represented in hemodynamics and rs-fMRI; provide insight into the reliability of time-resolved rs-fMRI across temporal scales; and establish a multimodal framework for validating features of dynamic brain activity.
Pan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.