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We each have a unique pattern of brain activity and it can be identified after spending less than 2 minutes in a brain scanner.

A connectome is a summary of a person’s neural connections produced via brain scans. These maps are usually depicted as multi-squared matrices colour-coded to show which parts of the brain are in sync and which aren’t.

at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and his colleagues looked at the brain imaging data of 100 people to figure out at what timescale a unique and identifiable connectome could be created.

Previous studies have shown that these maps can be used to identify individuals. However, building a connectome typically requires data from multiple MRI scans taken hours apart.

“So what we wanted to find out was, what’s the minimum time in a scanner necessary to obtain a reliable connectome?”, says Amico.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that a connectome, unlike other methods of identification like fingerprints, changes over time. “Brain activity is a complex, dynamical process,” says Amico.

But the researchers found that parts of the connectome could be linked to an individual’s unique pattern of neuronal activity – even when taken from a single functional MRI scan.

“If you look at short time windows, the most identifiable parts of activity come from the subcortical and sensory areas of the brain,” says Amico.

The researchers discovered they could create unique connectomes in 1 minute and 40 seconds, successfully identifying individuals from them about 95 per cent of the time.

The team plans to next use this method to look at the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Based on my initial findings, it seems that the features that make a connectome unique steadily disappear as the disease progresses,” says Amico. “It gets harder to identify people based on their connections.”

“Brain scans are notoriously noisy measurements, so we tend to average observations over groups,” says at the University of Cambridge. “The field is only just moving from group-level observations to results that apply at an individual level.

“In this context, it is remarkable that individual features of brain function emerge after less than 2 minutes of scan time. If it turns out that brain fingerprints can also be used to inform us about disease, then this compressed scan time could have important clinical implications.”

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