A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that brain activity could become a biometric identification measurement.The Yale-led imaging study showed how brain “connectivity profiles” allowed researchers to identify individuals from the fMRI images of brain activity of more than 100 people.”In most past studies, fMRI data have been used to draw contrasts between, say, patients and healthy controls,” Emily Finn, a Ph.D. student in neuroscience and co-first author of the paper, told Yale News. “We have learned a lot from these sorts of studies, but they tend to obscure individual differences which may be important.”In the study,, Finn and co-first author Xilin Shen, collected fMRI data from 126 subjects who underwent six scan sessions over two days.Subjects performed different cognitive tasks during four of the sessions. In the other two, they simply rested. Researchers looked at activity in 268 brain regions: specifically, coordinated activity between pairs of regions. Highly coordinated activity implies two regions are functionally connected. Using the strength of these connections across the whole brain, the researchers were able to identify individuals from fMRI data alone, whether the subject was at rest or engaged in a task. They were also able to predict how subjects would perform on tasks.

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