Age-specific brain funtional connectivity matrices for children and adolescents at school age

The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by pronounced shifts in brain structure and function that coincide with the development of physical, cognitive, and social abilities. Leveraging 378 resting-state fMRI scans from 190 healthy individuals aged 6-17 years in Chinese ColorNest Project, we demonstrate that the transition from childhood to adolescence is reflected in the gradual maturation of gradient patterns across the cortical sheet. In children, the overarching organizational gradient is anchored within unimodal cortex, between somato/motor and visual territories. Conversely, in adolescence the principal gradient of connectivity transitions into an adult-like spatial framework, with the default network at the opposite end of a spectrum from primary sensory and motor regions. Here, we release the age-specific group-level functional connectivity (FC) matrices for deriving gradient maps. Vertex-level FC matrices (20484 × 20484, the FC was computed in Freesurfer fsaverage5 space with the first 10242 rows/columns are vertexes from left hemisphere while the last are from right hemisphere, details of data preprocessing can be found in the paper) were generated for each resting-scan per visit by calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient between any two pair of vertices along the cortical surface and then the corresponding Fisher-z transformed values were obtained with a hyperbolic tangent function. Then the two test-retest FC fisher-z matrices within one visit were averaged to increase signal-to-noise ratio and reliability for generating individual FCz matrix. Individual FCz matrixes were next averaged across individuals to form a group-level FCz matrix. Only the top 10% connections of each vertex were retained to keep consistent with previous studies, other elements in the matrix were set to 0 to enforce sparsity. The "brainmask_l/rh.nii.gz" files store the quality assessment results, vertexes with signal loss are labled as 0 while others are labled as 1.