Topological persistence vineyard for dynamic functional brain connectivity during resting and gaming stages

•A novel approach in computational topology is proposed to study dynamic FC.•The persistence vineyard can analyze dynamic FC without thresholding and assumptions.•Task-related FC states and their temporal variations were successfully identified. Recent studies have shown the dynamic functional connectivity (FC) of the brain. Accordingly, new challenges have arisen for analyzing and interpreting this rich information. We identified the patterns of coherent FC using a novel method in computational topology called the persistence vineyard. It has been developed to track the characteristic change of the network topology under data perturbations in a threshold-free manner. We showed the relevance of this new approach by examining the dynamic FC in the resting and gaming stages of 26 healthy subjects. Our proposed method revealed stage and band-specific FC states that were topologically robust. While principal component analysis (PCA) estimated similar patterns to our FC states, it produced spurious connectivity due to its orthogonality assumption. Temporal variations of local and global network properties were examined with graph measures. However, unlike the persistence vineyard approach, their results were affected by the network density and its unknown topology. Unlike the existing methods, the persistence vineyard provided a more reliable and robust way to estimate FC states. Their extracted network topology changes showed patterns consistent with those of previous studies. Therefore, it may be a potentially powerful tool for studying the dynamic brain network.