Quality Assessment and Consistency of Serial Multi-Center Resting-State fMRI in Alzheimers Disease

David Clayton¹, Farshid Faraji¹, Douglas Arnold², Alex De Crespigny³, Alexandre Coimbra³

Several single site resting-state fMRI studies (RS-fMRI) have shown that brain functional connectivity metrics are altered in Alzheimer Disease (AD) patients. Exploratory RS-fMRI was included in two global Phase II studies of a novel AD drug. We report here fMRI data quality control procedures and observed quality metrics from screening and very early on-treatment scans. Subject tolerance and protocol compliance was good. In spite of heterogeneous scanning equipment and variable raw SNR across sites, the data pre-processing pipeline resulted in consistent processed data quality metrics, with few scans that could not be used for subsequent functional connectivity analysis.