Optimal slice timing correction and its interaction with fMRI parameters and artifacts.

Publication Type Academic Article
Authors Parker D, Liu X, Razlighi Q
Journal Med Image Anal
Volume 35
Pagination 434-445
Date Published 08/24/2016
ISSN 1361-8423
Keywords Artifacts, Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Abstract Due to the nature of fMRI acquisition protocols, slices in the plane of acquisition are not acquired simultaneously or sequentially, and therefore are temporally misaligned with each other. Slice timing correction (STC) is a critical preprocessing step that corrects for this temporal misalignment. Interpolation-based STC is implemented in all major fMRI processing software packages. To date, little effort has gone towards assessing the optimal method of STC. Delineating the benefits of STC can be challenging because of its slice-dependent gain as well as its interaction with other fMRI artifacts. In this study, we propose a new optimal method (Filter-Shift) based on the fundamental properties of sampling theory in digital signal processing. We then evaluate our method by comparing it to two other methods of STC from the most popular statistical software packages, SPM and FSL. STC methods were evaluated using 338 simulated and 30 real fMRI data and demonstrate the effectiveness of STC in general as well as the superiority of the proposed method in comparison to existing ones. All methods were evaluated under various scan conditions such as motion level, interleave sequence, scanner sampling rate, and the duration of the scan itself.
DOI 10.1016/j.media.2016.08.006
PubMed ID 27589578
PubMed Central ID PMC5274797
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