A Simulation of the Effects of Receive Field Contrast on Motion-Corrected EPI Time Series

TL;DR

This paper simulates how receive field contrast effects, combined with motion correction in MRI, can cause temporal artifacts and correlations in fMRI data, potentially affecting analysis accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a simulation-based analysis of the RFC-MoCo effect, revealing its potential to induce artifacts and degrade signal quality in motion-corrected EPI time series.

Findings

RFC-MoCo effects can mimic BOLD signals during motion

The effect can induce spurious correlations in fMRI data

Temporal SNR decreases with increasing motion

Abstract

The receive field of MRI imparts an image contrast which is spatially fixed relative to the receive coil. If motion correction is used to correct subject motion occurring during an EPI time series then the receiver contrast will effectively move relative to the subject and produce temporal modulations in the image amplitude. This effect, which we will call the RFC-MoCo effect, may have consequences in the analysis and interpretation of fMRI results. There are many potential causes of motion-related noise and systematic error in EPI time series and isolating the RFC-MoCo effect would be difficult. Therefore, we have undertaken a simulation of this effect to better understand its severity. The simulations examine this effect for a receive-only single-channel 16-leg birdcage coil and a receive-only 12-channel phased array. In particular we study: (1) The effect size; (2) Its consequences to the temporal correlations between signals arising at different spatial locations (spatial-temporal correlations) as is often calculated in resting state fMRI analyses; and (3) Its impact on the temporal signal-to-noise ratio of an EPI time series. We find that signal changes arising from the RFC-MoCo effect are likely to compete with BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) signal changes in the presence of significant motion, even under the assumption of perfect motion correction. Consequently, we find that the RFC-MoCo effect may lead to spurious temporal correlations across the image space, and that temporal SNR may be degraded with increasing motion.