fMRI-Based Inter-Subject Cortical Alignment Using Functional Connectivity

The inter-subject alignment of functional MRI (fMRI) data is important for improving the statistical power of fMRI group analyses. In contrast to existing anatomically-based methods, we propose a novel multi-subject algorithm that derives a functional correspondence by aligning spatial patterns of functional connectivity across a set of subjects. We test our method on fMRI data collected during a movie viewing experiment. By cross-validating the results of our algorithm, we show that the correspondence successfully generalizes to a secondary movie dataset not used to derive the alignment.