Abstract #3429

Effect of Voxel Size and Spatial Smoothing in Functional Connectivity

Christina Triantafyllou^1,2, Randy L. Buckner,^2,3, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli¹, Lawrence L. Wald²

¹A.A. Martinos Imaging Center, Mc Govern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States; ²A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; ³Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States

In this study we investigate the effect of voxel size, across a range of isotropic resolutions and we determine whether acquisition at high spatial resolution and smoothing in post-processing is a favorable strategy compared to direct acquisition at larger voxel size. The comparisons indicate that at least 3x3x3mm3 voxels are needed to see robust correlations in the unsmoothed maps, but smoothing to 6mm reveals the correlations with approximately equal z-scores regardless of the original acquisition resolution. Acquiring at high spatial resolution and smoothing to low resolution was found to be a favorable strategy compared to direct acquisition at lower resolution.