TbCAPs: A ToolBox for Co-Activation Pattern Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces TbCAPs, a comprehensive toolbox for co-activation pattern analysis of fMRI data, facilitating brain network dynamics research and demonstrating its application in predicting attentional performance.

Contribution

The paper presents a new, publicly accessible toolbox for CAP analysis that includes all pipeline steps and methodological improvements for brain dynamics studies.

Findings

Successfully predicted attentional performance from CAP metrics (R=0.59)

Demonstrated feasibility of CAP analysis in cognitive studies

Provided a publicly available toolbox for broader research use

Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging provides rich spatio-temporal data of human brain activity during task and rest. Many recent efforts have focussed on characterising dynamics of brain activity. One notable instance is co-activation pattern (CAP) analysis, a frame-wise analytical approach that disentangles the different functional brain networks interacting with a user-defined seed region. While promising applications in various clinical settings have been demonstrated, there is not yet any centralised, publicly accessible resource to facilitate the deployment of the technique. Here, we release a working version of TbCAPs, a new toolbox for CAP analysis, which includes all steps of the analytical pipeline, introduces new methodological developments that build on already existing concepts, and enables a facilitated inspection of CAPs and resulting metrics of brain dynamics. The toolbox is available on a public academic repository (https://c4science.ch/source/CAP_Toolbox.git). In addition, to illustrate the feasibility and usefulness of our pipeline, we describe an application to the study of human cognition. CAPs are constructed from resting-state fMRI using as seed the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and, in a separate sample, we successfully predict a behavioural measure of continuous attentional performance from the metrics of CAP dynamics (R=0.59).