Automatic independent component labeling for artifact removal in fMRI
Source: NeuroImage
2008 Feb;39(3):1227-1245.
Author: Tohka J, Foerde K, Aron AR, Tom SM, Toga AW & Poldrack RA PubMed ID: 18042495
Abstract:
Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals in functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are often small compared to the
level of noise in the data. The sources of noise are numerous
including different kinds of motion artifacts and physiological noise
with complex patterns. This complicates the statistical analysis of the
fMRI data. In this study, we propose an automatic method to reduce
fMRI artifacts based on independent component analysis (ICA). We
trained a supervised classifier to distinguish between independent
components relating to a potentially task-related signal and
independent components clearly relating to structured noise. After
the components had been classified as either signal or noise, a
denoised fMR time-series was reconstructed based only on the
independent components classified as potentially task-related. The
classifier was a novel global (fixed structure) decision tree trained in
a Neyman–Pearson (NP) framework, which allowed the shape of the
decision regions to be controlled effectively. Additionally, the
conservativeness of the classifier could be tuned by modifying the
NP threshold. The classifier was tested against the component
classifications by an expert with the data from a category learning
task. The test set as well as the expert were different from the data
used for classifier training and the expert labeling the training set.
The misclassification rate was between 0.2 and 0.3 for both the eventrelated
and blocked designs and it was consistent among variety of
different NP thresholds. The effects of denoising on the group-level
statistical analyses were as expected: The denoising generally
decreased Z-scores in the white matter, where extreme Z-values can
be expected to reflect artifacts. A similar but weaker decrease in
Z-scores was observed in the gray matter on average. These two
observations suggest that denoising was likely to reduce artifacts from
gray matter and could be useful to improve the detection of
activations. We conclude that automatic ICA-based denoising offers
a potentially useful approach to improve the quality of fMRI data and consequently increase the accuracy of the statistical analysis of
these data.