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. 2025 Sep 8.
doi: 10.1002/jmri.70105. Online ahead of print.

Predicting Breath Hold Task Compliance From Head Motion

Timothy B Weng  1 , Gargi Porwal  1 , Dhivya Srinivasan  2 , Ben Inglis  3 , Sabrina Rodriguez  1 , David R Jacobs Jr  4 , Pamela J Schreiner  5 , Farzaneh A Sorond  5 , Stephen Sidney  6 , Cora Lewis  7 , Lenore Launer  8 , Guray Erus  2 , Ilya M Nasrallah  2 , R Nick Bryan  2 , Adrienne N Dula  1
Affiliations

Predicting Breath Hold Task Compliance From Head Motion

Timothy B Weng et al. J Magn Reson Imaging. .

Abstract

Background: Cerebrovascular reactivity reflects changes in cerebral blood flow in response to an acute stimulus and is reflective of the brain's ability to match blood flow to demand. Functional MRI with a breath-hold task can be used to elicit this vasoactive response, but data validity hinges on subject compliance. Determining breath-hold compliance often requires external monitoring equipment.

Purpose: To develop a non-invasive and data-driven quality filter for breath-hold compliance using only measurements of head motion during imaging.

Study type: Prospective cohort.

Participants: Longitudinal data from healthy middle-aged subjects enrolled in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Brain MRI Study, N = 1141, 47.1% female.

Field strength/sequence: 3.0 Tesla gradient-echo MRI.

Assessment: Manual labelling of respiratory belt monitored data was used to determine breath hold compliance during MRI scan. A model to estimate the probability of non-compliance with the breath hold task was developed using measures of head motion. The model's ability to identify scans in which the participant was not performing the breath hold were summarized using performance metrics including sensitivity, specificity, recall, and F1 score. The model was applied to additional unmarked data to assess effects on population measures of CVR.

Statistical tests: Sensitivity analysis revealed exclusion of non-compliant scans using the developed model did not affect median cerebrovascular reactivity (Median [q1, q3] = 1.32 [0.96, 1.71]) compared to using manual review of respiratory belt data (1.33 [1.02, 1.74]) while reducing interquartile range.

Results: The final model based on a multi-layer perceptron machine learning classifier estimated non-compliance with an accuracy of 76.9% and an F1 score of 69.5%, indicating a moderate balance between precision and recall for the identification of scans in which the participant was not compliant.

Data conclusion: The developed model provides the probability of non-compliance with a breath-hold task, which could later be used as a quality filter or included in statistical analyses.

Level of evidence: 1: TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 3.

Keywords: breath hold; cerebrovascular reactivity; data quality; fMRI.

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