Longitudinal Patterns of Functional Network Changes Over Four-Year Period Associated with Sex in the Developing Brain

Functional network connectivity (FNC) is a valuable measure for assessing the temporal interdependence and intrinsic functional relationships among brain networks. While longitudinal research on intrinsic functional connectivity has been useful for characterizing age-related changes across whole-brain networks, there has been limited focus on capturing multivariate patterns of FNC changes during brain development. In this study, we employed a previously proposed method that utilizes FNC matrices to estimate multiple overlapping brain functional change patterns (FCPs). This method was applied to the extensive Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset. Our findings reveal several well-structured FCPs indicating significant changes over a four-year period, including brain functional connectivity between visual network (VSN) and sensorimotor network (SMN) domains. This FNC expression pattern strengthens with age. Additionally, we observed a distinct pattern of changes between male and female individuals for two components including males show stronger increasing coupling between the default mode network (DMN) and VSN compared to females.