Reliability of Magnetoencephalography and High-Density Electroencephalography Resting-State Functional Connectivity Metrics

Resting-state connectivity, for example, based on magnetoencephalography (MEG) or electroencephalography (EEG), is a widely used method for characterizing brain networks and a promising imaging biomarker. However, there is no established standard as to which method, modality, and analysis variant is preferable and there is only limited knowledge on the reproducibility, an important prerequisite for clinical application. We conducted an MEG-/high-density (hd)-EEG-study on 22 young healthy adults, who were measured twice in a scan/rescan design after 7 ± 2 days. Reliability of resting-state (15 min, eyes-closed) connectivity in source space was calculated via intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) in classical frequency bands (delta-gamma). We investigated the reliability of two commonly used connectivity metrics, namely the imaginary part of coherency and the weighted phase-lag index and the influence of frequency band, vigilance, and the number of trials. We found a strong increase of reliability with more trials and relatively mild effects of vigilance. Reliability was excellent in the alpha band for MEG, as well as hd-EEG (ICC >0.85); in the theta band, reliability was good for MEG and poor for EEG. Other frequency bands showed lower reliability, with delta band being the worst. Furthermore, we investigated the spatial reliability of resting-state connectivity in a vertex-based approach, which reached fair to good reliability (ICC up to 0.67) with 5 min of data. Our results indicate that excellent reliability of global connectivity is achievable in alpha band, and vertex-based connectivity was still fair to good. Moreover, electrophysiological resting-state studies could benefit from more data than used previously. MEG and hd-EEG were similar in their overall performance but showed frequency band-specific differences.