Precision Functional Parcellation of the Human Cortex via Rest-Task fMRI Fusion

Abstract

Individual-specific cortical parcellations enable the characterization of brain network organization that is often obscured by population-level atlases, with broad implications for both basic neuroscience and translational applications. However, existing methods rely primarily on resting-state fMRI and underutilize task-evoked data, which provide complementary information about functional specialization. This limitation partly reflects the challenge of integrating heterogeneous datasets that differ in task design, sample size, and cortical coverage. Here, we present mRBM-HBP, a scalable hierarchical Bayesian framework that incorporates a multinomial restricted Boltzmann machine to model spatial dependencies, enabling efficient and flexible integration of resting-state and task fMRI across diverse datasets and inference of both group-level and individual-level cortical parcellations. We show that mRBM-HBP achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art resting-state-based parcellation methods while substantially reducing computational cost. By integrating large-scale task-fMRI datasets, we derive a task-based parcellation and demonstrate that resting-state and task conditions reveal largely consistent macroscopic networks, while task data provide state-specific refinements of functional boundaries. Moreover, a fused rest-task group-level atlas improves the accuracy, reliability, and individual specificity of inferred parcellations, particularly when individual-level data are limited. These results indicate that integrating resting-state and task fMRI enhances precision mapping of functional brain organization.