Lessons for MRI recruitment in movement disorder: Clinical presentation is not related to motion artefacts in arterial spin labelling MRI

Motion artefacts pose significant problems for the acquisition and analysis of MRI data. In movement disorders, severe motion-related artefacts can result in data being discarded as non-usable. It is not known to what degree clinical movement symptoms can predict in-scanner motion artefacts, and thus, whether researchers can target recruitment for MRI studies based on clinical presentation. Here we investigate whether movement severity in Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative movement disorder, can predict in-scanner motion artefacts in arterial spin labelling data. We find that motion magnitude and variability is not more pronounced in Huntington’s disease and not related to symptom severity.