Spine-prints: Transposing brain fingerprints to the spinal cord

Functional connectivity (FC) patterns in the human brain form a reproducible, individual-specific “fingerprint” that allows reliable identification of the same participant across scans acquired over different sessions. While brain fingerprinting is robust across healthy individuals and neuroimaging modalities, little is known about whether the fingerprinting principle extends beyond the brain. Here, we used multiple functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets acquired at different sites to examine whether a fingerprint can be revealed from FCs of the cervical region of the human spinal cord. Our results demonstrate that the functional organization of this region also exhibits individual-specific properties, suggesting the potential existence of a spine-print within the same acquisition session. Although the spine-print scores are not directly comparable to those observed in the brain, this discrepancy may, in part, reflect the intrinsic limitations of imaging this region with fMRI, where the signals are more susceptible to noise and effective resolution relative to structure size, and tSNR are markedly lower than in the brain. This study provides the first evidence of a spinal cord connectivity fingerprint, underscoring the importance of considering a more comprehensive view of the entire central nervous system. Eventually, these spine-specific signatures could contribute to identifying individualized biomarkers of neuronal connectivity, with potential clinical applications in neurology and neurosurgery.