Identifiable Patterns of Trait, State, and Experience in Chronic Stroke Recovery.

Background: Considerable evidence indicates that the functional connectome of the healthy human brain is highly stable, analogous to a fingerprint.

Objective: We investigated the stability of functional connectivity across tasks and sessions in a cohort of individuals with chronic stroke using a supervised machine learning approach.

Methods: Twelve individuals with chronic stroke underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) seven times over 18 weeks. The middle 6 weeks consisted of intensive aphasia therapy. We collected fMRI data during rest and performance of 2 tasks. We calculated functional connectivity metrics for each imaging run, then applied a support vector machine to classify data on the basis of participant, task, and time point (pre- or posttherapy). Permutation testing established statistical significance.

Results: Whole brain functional connectivity matrices could be classified at levels significantly greater than chance on the basis of participant (87.1% accuracy; < .0001), task (68.1% accuracy; = .002), and time point (72.1% accuracy; = .015). All significant effects were reproduced using only the contralesional right hemisphere; the left hemisphere revealed significant effects for participant and task, but not time point. Resting state data could also be used to classify task-based data according to subject (66.0%; < .0001). While the strongest posttherapy changes occurred among regions outside putative language networks, connections with traditional language-associated regions were significantly more positively correlated with behavioral outcome measures, and other regions had more negative correlations and intrahemispheric connections.

Conclusions: Findings suggest the profound importance of considering interindividual variability when interpreting mechanisms of recovery in studies of functional connectivity in stroke.