Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 May 4:17:1076824.
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1076824. eCollection 2023.

Quality control in resting-state fMRI: the benefits of visual inspection

Rebecca J Lepping  1   2 , Hung-Wen Yeh  3   4 , Brent C McPherson  5 , Morgan G Brucks  2   6 , Mohammad Sabati  2   7 , Rainer T Karcher  2 , William M Brooks  1   2 , Joshua D Habiger  8 , Vlad B Papa  2 , Laura E Martin  2   6
Affiliations

Quality control in resting-state fMRI: the benefits of visual inspection

Rebecca J Lepping et al. Front Neurosci. .

Abstract

Background: A variety of quality control (QC) approaches are employed in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to determine data quality and ultimately inclusion or exclusion of a fMRI data set in group analysis. Reliability of rs-fMRI data can be improved by censoring or "scrubbing" volumes affected by motion. While censoring preserves the integrity of participant-level data, including excessively censored data sets in group analyses may add noise. Quantitative motion-related metrics are frequently reported in the literature; however, qualitative visual inspection can sometimes catch errors or other issues that may be missed by quantitative metrics alone. In this paper, we describe our methods for performing QC of rs-fMRI data using software-generated quantitative and qualitative output and trained visual inspection.

Results: The data provided for this QC paper had relatively low motion-censoring, thus quantitative QC resulted in no exclusions. Qualitative checks of the data resulted in limited exclusions due to potential incidental findings and failed pre-processing scripts.

Conclusion: Visual inspection in addition to the review of quantitative QC metrics is an important component to ensure high quality and accuracy in rs-fMRI data analysis.

Keywords: artifacts; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); quality control; reproducibility of results; resting state—fMRI.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Data checking steps include qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the imaging data to determine inclusion in group level analysis.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Resting state fMRI data processing and QC workflow.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Andellini M., Cannatà V., Gazzellini S., Bernardi B., Napolitano A. (2015). Test-retest reliability of graph metrics of resting state MRI functional brain networks: a review. J. Neurosci. Methods 253, 183–192. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2015.05.020, PMID: - DOI - PubMed
    1. Beall E. B., Lowe M. J. (2014). SimPACE: generating simulated motion corrupted BOLD data with synthetic-navigated acquisition for the development and evaluation of SLOMOCO: a new, highly effective slicewise motion correction. NeuroImage 101, 21–34. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.06.038, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Birn R. M., Molloy E. K., Patriat R., Parker T., Meier T. B., Kirk G. R., et al. . (2013). The effect of scan length on the reliability of resting-state fMRI connectivity estimates. NeuroImage 83, 550–558. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.099, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Biswal B. B., Mennes M., Zuo X. N., Gohel S., Kelly C., Smith S. M., et al. . (2010). Toward discovery science of human brain function. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 107, 4734–4739. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0911855107, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Carp J. (2013). Optimizing the order of operations for movement scrubbing: comment on Power et al. NeuroImage 76, 436–438. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.12.061 - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources