ENTROPY BASED DTI QUALITY CONTROL VIA REGIONAL ORIENTATION DISTRIBUTION

A connectivity-based test-retest dataset of multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging in young healthy adults

Recently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely used to investigate the structures and functions of the human brain in health and disease in vivo. However, there are growing concerns about the test-retest reliability of structural and functional measurements derived from MRI data. Here, we present a test-retest dataset of multi-modal MRI including structural MRI (S-MRI), diffusion MRI (D-MRI) and resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI). Fifty-seven healthy young adults (age range: 19-30 years) were recruited and completed two multi-modal MRI scan sessions at an interval of approximately 6 weeks. Each scan session included R-fMRI, S-MRI and D-MRI data. Additionally, there were two separated R-fMRI scans at the beginning and at the end of the first session (approximately 20 min apart). This multi-modal MRI dataset not only provides excellent opportunities to investigate the short- and long-term test-retest reliability of the brain's structural and functional measurements at the regional, connectional and network levels, but also allows probing the test-retest reliability of structural-functional couplings in the human brain.

A high resolution 7-Tesla resting-state fMRI test-retest dataset with cognitive and physiological measures

Here we present a test-retest dataset of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired at rest. 22 participants were scanned during two sessions spaced one week apart. Each session includes two 1.5 mm isotropic whole-brain scans and one 0.75 mm isotropic scan of the prefrontal cortex, giving a total of six time-points. Additionally, the dataset includes measures of mood, sustained attention, blood pressure, respiration, pulse, and the content of self-generated thoughts (mind wandering). This data enables the investigation of sources of both intra- and inter-session variability not only limited to physiological changes, but also including alterations in cognitive and affective states, at high spatial resolution. The dataset is accompanied by a detailed experimental protocol and source code of all stimuli used.

An open science resource for establishing reliability and reproducibility in functional connectomics

Efforts to identify meaningful functional imaging-based biomarkers are limited by the ability to reliably characterize inter-individual differences in human brain function. Although a growing number of connectomics-based measures are reported to have moderate to high test-retest reliability, the variability in data acquisition, experimental designs, and analytic methods precludes the ability to generalize results. The Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) is working to address this challenge and establish test-retest reliability as a minimum standard for methods development in functional connectomics. Specifically, CoRR has aggregated 1,629 typical individuals’ resting state fMRI (rfMRI) data (5,093 rfMRI scans) from 18 international sites, and is openly sharing them via the International Data-sharing Neuroimaging Initiative (INDI). To allow researchers to generate various estimates of reliability and reproducibility, a variety of data acquisition procedures and experimental designs are included. Similarly, to enable users to assess the impact of commonly encountered artifacts (for example, motion) on characterizations of inter-individual variation, datasets of varying quality are included.

DTIPrep: quality control of diffusion-weighted images

In the last decade, diffusion MRI (dMRI) studies of the human and animal brain have been used to investigate a multitude of pathologies and drug-related effects in neuroscience research. Study after study identifies white matter (WM) degeneration as a crucial biomarker for all these diseases. The tool of choice for studying WM is dMRI. However, dMRI has inherently low signal-to-noise ratio and its acquisition requires a relatively long scan time; in fact, the high loads required occasionally stress scanner hardware past the point of physical failure. As a result, many types of artifacts implicate the quality of diffusion imagery. Using these complex scans containing artifacts without quality control (QC) can result in considerable error and bias in the subsequent analysis, negatively affecting the results of research studies using them. However, dMRI QC remains an under-recognized issue in the dMRI community as there are no user-friendly tools commonly available to comprehensively address the issue of dMRI QC. As a result, current dMRI studies often perform a poor job at dMRI QC. Thorough QC of dMRI will reduce measurement noise and improve reproducibility, and sensitivity in neuroimaging studies; this will allow researchers to more fully exploit the power of the dMRI technique and will ultimately advance neuroscience. Therefore, in this manuscript, we present our open-source software, DTIPrep, as a unified, user friendly platform for thorough QC of dMRI data. These include artifacts caused by eddy-currents, head motion, bed vibration and pulsation, venetian blind artifacts, as well as slice-wise and gradient-wise intensity inconsistencies. This paper summarizes a basic set of features of DTIPrep described earlier and focuses on newly added capabilities related to directional artifacts and bias analysis.

DTI Quality Control Assessment via Error Estimation From Monte Carlo Simulations

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is currently the state of the art method for characterizing microscopic tissue structure in the white matter in normal or diseased brain in vivo. DTI is estimated from a series of Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) volumes. DWIs suffer from a number of artifacts which mandate stringent Quality Control (QC) schemes to eliminate lower quality images for optimal tensor estimation. Conventionally, QC procedures exclude artifact-affected DWIs from subsequent computations leading to a cleaned, reduced set of DWIs, called DWI-QC. Often, a rejection threshold is heuristically/empirically chosen above which the entire DWI-QC data is rendered unacceptable and thus no DTI is computed. In this work, we have devised a more sophisticated, Monte-Carlo simulation based method for the assessment of resulting tensor properties. This allows for a consistent, error-based threshold definition in order to reject/accept the DWI-QC data. Specifically, we propose the estimation of two error metrics related to directional distribution bias of Fractional Anisotropy (FA) and the Principal Direction (PD). The bias is modeled from the DWI-QC gradient information and a Rician noise model incorporating the loss of signal due to the DWI exclusions. Our simulations further show that the estimated bias can be substantially different with respect to magnitude and directional distribution depending on the degree of spatial clustering of the excluded DWIs. Thus, determination of diffusion properties with minimal error requires an evenly distributed sampling of the gradient directions before and after QC.