Functional brain interactions during free viewing of video stream

In this paper, we present a data-driven approach to explore consistent and discriminative functional interactions during free viewing of video stream. The underlying premise is that the functional interactions, derived from natural stimulus functional magnetic resonance imaging (N-fMRI) data of multiple subjects during watching videos in multi-categories, are simultaneously selected by multiple feature selection methods in video classification tasks to pose both discriminability and consistency across subjects. The spatial distribution of the ROIs involved in the identified interactions and the distribution of the functional sub-networks associated with the ROIs are assessed. Meanwhile, structural connectivity derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and video classification is used to evaluate the consistency and discriminability of the identified functional interactions, respectively. Our findings provide new insights into the functional mechanism of the human brain in perception and cognition of complex natural scenes.