Abstract #0067

Advanced combinations of dual-echo fMRI data provide no advantages over the simple average at group-level analyses

Ádám Kettinger^1,2, Christian Windischberger³, Christopher Hill⁴, and Zoltán Nagy⁴

¹Department of Nuclear Techniques, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary, ²Brain Imaging Centre, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, ³Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, ⁴Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Multi-echo EPI acquisitions are used in fMRI research due to their superior BOLD sensitivity. Several advanced methods of echo combinations have been proposed. We confirmed, using dual-echo data, that CNR weighting is the optimal combination on a single subject level. However, we have shown that these advantages do not carry over to a group analysis where a simple averaging of the echos provides equally good statistical results. This is likely due to the increase of inter-subject variance of contrast-to-noise ratio. Future work aims to quantitatively compare inter-subject and intra-subject variance of dual-echo data in group studies.

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