Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast has become a widespread technique in brain research. The central challenge in fMRI is the detection of relatively small activity-induced signal changes in the presence of various other signal fluctuations. Physiological fluctuations due to respiration and cardiac pulsation are dominant sources of confounding variability in BOLD fMRI. This dissertation seeks to characterize and compensate for non-neural physiological fluctuations in fMRI.
First, the dissertation presents an improved and generalized technique for correcting T1 effect in cardiac-gated fMRI data incorporating flip angle estimated from fMRI dataset itself. Using an unscented Kalman filter, spatial maps of flip angle and T1 relaxation are estimated simultaneously from the cardiac-gated time series. Accounting for spatial variation in flip angle, the new method is able to remove the T1 effects robustly, in the presence of significant B1 inhomogeneity. The technique is demonstrated with simulations and experimental data. Secondly, this dissertation describes a generalized retrospective technique to precisely model and remove physiological fluctuations from fMRI signal: Physiological Impulse Response Function Estimation and Correction (PIRFECT).
It is found that the modeled long-term physiological fluctuations explained significant variance in grey matter, even after removing short-term physiological effects. Finally, application of the proposed technique is observed to substantially increase the intra-session reproducibility of resting-state networks.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/44862 |
| Date | 03 July 2012 |
| Creators | Shin, Jaemin |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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