Applications of random field theory to functional connectivity.

Functional connectivity between two voxels or regions of voxels can be measured by the correlation between voxel measurements from either PET CBF or BOLD fMRI images in 3D. We propose to look at the entire 6D matrix of correlations between all voxels and search for 6D local maxima. The main result is a new theoretical formula based on random field theory for the p-value of these local maxima, which distinguishes true correlations from background noise. This can be applied to crosscorrelations between two different sets of images--such as activations under two different tasks, as well as autocorrelations within the same set of images.