2.5. Modifications in the awFC approach

Building on the awFC approach proposed by Bowman et al. (2012), our current study utilized independent component analysis (ICA) and FATCAT to extract networks of regions of interest, rather than performing cluster analysis as outlined in Bowman et al. (2012). The singular value decomposition (SVD) clustering process implemented by Bowman et al. (2012) is computationally expensive for a matrix of size n × m and becomes increasingly more complex between each region pair as the number of ROIs increases (Vasudevan & Ramakrishna, 2019). ICA, on the other hand, reveals distinct spatial maps, across healthy and clinical study populations (Juneja, Rana, & Agrawal, 2016; Vergun et al., 2016). ICA is a powerful methodology, and is straightforward to apply with FATCAT's recommended pipeline involving FSL's MELODIC (Griffanti, 2019; Nascimento et al., 2017).