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Abstract #0886

Characterizing spatial heterogeneity of BOLD fMRI cortical-depth profiles of activation: the average profile may not be typical

Anna I Blazejewska1,2, Daniel Gomez1,2, and Jonathan R Polimeni1,2,3
1Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, 2Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, 3Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

Synopsis

Keywords: fMRI Analysis, fMRI, fMRI Analysis, fMRI (task based), Brain, Gray Matter, Neuroscience, Blood, Data Analysis

Motivation: Laminar-fMRI analysis routinely averages cortical-depth profiles within an ROI to estimate a typical laminar activation profile and increase SNR. Previous studies suggested heterogeneity of cortical-depth profiles measured with GE-BOLD-fMRI, therefore the assumption that profiles inside ROI are similar may not hold.

Goal(s): To test whether the average cortical-depth profile is typical for the whole ROI.

Approach: We applied k-means clustering to identify cortical locations within an ROI with similar BOLD-fMRI cortical-depth profiles.

Results: Cortical-depth profiles vary substantially across the activated region and therefore the average response profile inside the ROI may not be resemble that of any particular activated location.

Impact: In laminar-fMRI analysis, due to heterogeneity of neuronal responses and/or vascular architecture the average cortical-depth profile within an ROI may not match the profile at any one location, suggesting that averaging may lose meaningful layer-specific information within the activated region.

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Keywords