Evidence For Bias Of Genetic Ancestry In Resting State Functional MRI

Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a popular imaging modality for mapping the functional connectivity of the brain. Rs-fMRI is, just like other neuroimaging modalities, subject to a series of technical and subject level biases that change the inferred connectivity pattern. In this work we predicted genetic ancestry from rs-fMRI connectivity data at very high performance (area under the ROC curve of 0.93). Thereby, we demonstrated that genetic ancestry is encoded in the functional connectivity pattern of the brain at rest. We hypothesize that these observed differences are a result of known ethnicity-related variations in head and brain morphology, which may be carried forward through the rs-fMRI processing pipeline, rather than true neuronal differences. In any case, genetic ancestry constitutes a bias that should be accounted for in the analysis of rs-fMRI data.