Temporal Variability in Brain Connectivity for Estimating Two-Year Clinical Severity in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Connectivity variability from baseline resting-state fMRI in 48 ADNI participants with mild cognitive impairment predicts 2-year CDR-SB severity with lower mean absolute error (1.51) than static connectivity (1.66).

• Why it matters: Static functional connectivity averages over time and may miss short-timescale fluctuations that could reflect early network changes linked to later cognitive decline.
• What they did: The study computed temporal variability as the standard deviation of windowed correlations across 21 brain-network pairs, then used repeated nested cross-validation to predict follow-up CDR-SB.
• The result: Adding connectivity variability reduced error versus clinical covariates alone and static connectivity, including with motion covariates (1.59 vs 1.70/1.73), but gains were sensitive to temporal windows and were driven largely by participants without later worsening.

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