In this study, we used resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) to investigate the effects of age, sex, and IQ on the organizational patterns of functional brain networks in healthy children. Rs-fMRI has emerged as a novel method to assess the spontaneous or intrinsic activity of the brain and to study developmental changes in the functional interactions between brain regions [17], [18]. We measured functional connectivity [19] by calculating the correlations between the time series of any pair of the 90 regions in the whole brain (defined by a prior atlas) during the resting state. A correlation matrix was obtained in each of 51 healthy children aged from 6 to 18 years and further thresholded into a binary, undirected network underlying the topological organization of a functional brain network. Finally, we investigated the effects of age, sex, and IQ on the network properties at both the global and regional levels.
