Kerstin Pannek1,2, Jane Mathias3,
Greg Brown4, Jamie Taylor5, Stephen Rose2
1Centre for Advanced
Imaging, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; 2Centre
for Clinical Research, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland,
Australia; 3School of Psychology, University of Adelaide,
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; 4MRI Unit, Royal Adelaide
Hospital, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; 5Radiology, Royal
Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Motion artifacts are often seen in diffusion weighted data of patient participants, but less frequently in data of control participants. We investigated the influence of the presence of motion artifact on cortico-cortical tractography streamline number by artificially introducing corrupted slices into the diffusion datasets. We found that as few as 10 slices affected by motion artifact significantly bias streamline number with no pathology present. This study highlights the importance of removing data affected by motion artifact from analysis.