MICCAI 2013 - LNCS 8149-8151

Group-Wise FMRI Activation Detection on Corresponding Cortical Landmarks

Jinglei Lv^{1, 2}, Dajiang Zhu², Xintao Hu¹, Xin Zhang^{1, 2}, Tuo Zhang^{1, 2}, Junwei Han¹, Lei Guo^{1, 2}, and Tianming Liu²

¹School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China

²Department of Computer Science and Bioimaging Research Center, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Abstract. Group-wise activation detection in task-based fMRI has been widely used because of its robustness to noises and statistical power to deal with variability of individual brains. However, current group-wise fMRI activation detection methods typically rely on the spatial alignment established by co-registration of individual brains’ fMRI images into the same template space, which has difficulty in dealing with the remarkable anatomic variation of different brains. As a consequence, the resulted misalignment among multiple brains could substantially degrade the accuracy and specificity of group-wise fMRI activation detection. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel methodology to detect group-wise fMRI activation based on a publicly released dense map of DTI-derived structural cortical landmarks, which possess intrinsic correspondences across individuals and populations. The basic idea here is that a first-level general linear model (GLM) analysis is performed on fMRI signals of each corresponding cortical landmark in each individual brain’s own space, and then the single-subject effect size of the same landmark from a group of subjects are statistically integrated and assessed at the group level using the mixed-effects model. As a result, the consistently activated cortical landmarks are determined and declared group-wisely in response to external block-based stimuli. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach can map meaningful group-wise activation patterns on the atlas of cortical landmarks without image registration between subjects and spatial smoothing.

Keywords: DTI, fMRI, group-wise activation detection, cortical landmarks

LNCS 8150, p. 665 ff.

Full article in PDF | BibTeX