Neurodevelopmental subtypes of functional brain organization in the ABCD study using a rigorous analytic framework

Abstract

The current study demonstrates that an individual's resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) is a dependable biomarker for identifying differential patterns of cognitive and emotional functioning during late childhood. Using baseline RSFC data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which includes children aged 9–11, we identified four distinct RSFC subtypes. We introduce an integrated methodological pipeline for testing the reliability and importance of these subtypes. In the Identification phase, Leiden Community Detection defined RSFC subtypes, with their reproducibility confirmed through a split-sample technique in the Validation stage. The Evaluation phase showed that distinct cognitive and mental health profiles are associated with each subtype, with the Predictive phase indicating that subtypes better predict various cognitive and mental health characteristics than individual RSFC connections. The Replication stage employed bootstrapping and down-sampling methods to substantiate the reproducibility of these subtypes further. This work allows future explorations of developmental trajectories of these RSFC subtypes.