Embedding of Functional Human Brain Networks on a Sphere

Abstract: Human brain activity is often measured using the blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signals obtained through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The strength of connectivity between brain regions is then measured as a Pearson correlation matrix. As the number of brain regions increases, the dimension of matrix increases. It becomes extremely cumbersome to even visualize and quantify such weighted complete networks. To remedy the problem, we propose to embed brain networks onto a sphere, which is a Riemannian manifold with constant positive curvature. The Matlab code for the spherical embedding is given in https://github.com/laplcebeltrami/sphericalMDS.