Sliding-Window Dynamic Functional Connectivity Of Resting-State Spinal Cord fMRI Reveals Specific Interaction Patterns

In recent years, while the exploration of spontaneous brain activity has shifted from static methods (i.e., examining average connectivity patterns over the entire run) towards dynamic approaches (i.e., accounting for the non-stationarity of resting-state fluctuations), the non-stationary nature of intrinsic activity in the spinal cord has seldom been studied. Here, we propose to probe time-varying functional connectivity patterns in the spinal cord using a sliding-window correlation approach, as commonly employed in the brain. Our results suggest the potential of this approach to unravel ventral-ventral and dorsal-dorsal correlation patterns, while also emphasizing their time-varying nature.