Effects of Rapid Head Motions on Group fMRI Functional Connectivity Evaluated with E-REMCOR

Vadim Zotev¹, Han Yuan¹, Masaya Misaki¹, Raquel Phillips¹, Kymberly D. Young¹, Jerzy Bodurka¹, ²

We have applied EEG-assisted retrospective motion correction (E-REMCOR) to evaluate effects of rapid head movements on fMRI functional connectivity data. Twenty MDD patients underwent a resting EEG-fMRI scan. Functional connectivity patterns for seed ROI in the medial prefrontal cortex obtained with and without E-REMCOR were compared. The comparison shows that rapid head movements increase the apparent connectivity strength with the seed ROI for anterior brain regions and reduce it for posterior regions. Our results confirm that effects of head motions are observed in group-level fMRI analysis. They further suggest that E-REMCOR is an efficient motion correction technique for fMRI.