Exploratory evaluation of treatment-induced connectivity changes
To explore how the target RSNs were affected by rTMS, active and sham groups were compared in terms of treatment-induced change in connectivity. Connectivity was calculated between five a priori ROIs defined in the original clinical trial, including left/right stimulation sites, DAN, DMN, and sgACC. This analysis was conducted using covariance rather than correlation, since covariance is less sensitive to the potential influence of changing amplitudes of BOLD fluctuations between different time pointsTo explore how the rest of the brain was affected by rTMS, ROI-ROI connectivity was calculated with each of the 17 Yeo networks and voxel-wise connectivity was calculated with the whole brain. Active and sham groups were compared using a general linear model (GLM) with group assignment as the primary predictor, post-treatment connectivity as the outcome, and pre-treatment connectivity as a covariate. Except where required for voxel-wise multiple comparisons correction, statistical hypothesis testing was not conducted for active-sham comparisons because the trial did not reach its original target sample size