Resting State ICA Enhanced with Multi-Echo FMRI

Prantik Kundu¹, Peter Bandettini

It is proposed that the multiple voxel timecourses obtained from multi-echo (ME) fMRI can be input to Independent Components Analysis (ICA) to enhance decomposition quality. Robust hemodynamic activity should be expressed across all contrasts within the TE range for BOLD, and providing fMRI data of multiple TEs should enhance ICA by increasing the representation of true hemodynamic sources, decreasing relative ratios of TE-specific RF noise, and weighting contribution of non-hemodynamic physiological signal towards one TE. The hypothesis is verified, and it is shown that ME fMRI greatly enhances ICA decomposition without prolonging resting fMRI acquisitions otherwise required for larger datasets.