Functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) is technique for analyzing functional MRI (fMRI) data to determine the functional relatedness of selected brain regions. It is based on determining brain regions that demonstrate temporally correlated blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal.19,20 This technique demonstrates differential patterns of functional hippocampal connectivity during resting state between patients with Alzheimer’s disease and healthy volunteers, as controls showed diffuse cortical and subcortical connectivity and patients demonstrated reduced connectivity including absence of connectivity with the frontal lobes.21,22 While Alzheimer’s patients demonstrate a reduction in hippocampal functional connectivity, the association between functional connectivity and behavioral measures is not well understood, as the aforementioned studies examined patients documented to have poorer performance on tasks of memory ability than controls, but did not correlate their memory performance to connectivity measures.
