Reproducibility of seed-based rs-fMRI measures at 7 tesla
Katherine A Koenig1, Sehong Oh1, Wanyong Shin1, and Mark J Lowe1

1Imaging Sciences, The Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, United States

Synopsis

This work assesses the reproducibility of seed-based rs-fMRI measures at 7 tesla in a sample of five controls and three patients with multiple sclerosis. We show high reproducibility but with large variation in some subjects.

Purpose

Previous reports of reproducibility of seed-based resting state functional connectivity (rs-fMRI) have shown a wide range of reproducibility [1,2,3], impacted by scan length, physiologic noise, and choice of network measures. Though signal fluctuations at 7T are also impacted by sources other than neuronal activity, the percent of signal fluctuation attributable to neuronal activity is also increased [4]. Here we evaluate scan-rescan reliability of seed-based rs-fMRI 7 tesla.

Methods

Five healthy controls and 3 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) were scanned, repositioned and re-scanned on a Siemens 7T Magnetom MRI scanner with SC72 gradient (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen) using a 32-channel head coil (Nova Medical). Rs-fMRI data were acquired using slice-accelerated EPI sequence (WIP 770, Siemens). The scan parameters were as follows: 132 repetitions of 81 slices acquired with TE/TR=21ms/2800ms, 1.5mm slice thickness, matrix 160x160, FOV 210mm x 210mm, multi-band factor = 3, grappa factor = 2, and receive bandwidth = 1562 Hz/pixel. Subjects were instructed to keep their eyes closed during scans. Scans were corrected for motion and physiologic noise, detrended, and lowpass filtered [5,6]. Using a previously published method [7], 9-voxel in-plane seeds were placed to evaluate the strength of connectivity in the transcallosal motor pathway (bilateral primary motor cortex) and the posterior portion of the cingulum bundle (posterior cingulate cortex and hippocampus). Correlation measures were normalized to z-scores using whole-brain correlation maps [8].

Results

Scan 1 and Scan 2 rs-fMRI scores in the transcallosal motor pathway were highly correlated (Figure 1; r = 0.937, p = 6 x 10-4; ICC = 0.904), as were test-retest measures of the right and left posterior cingulum bundle (r = 0.8567 p = 0.007; ICC = 0.729). Figure 2 shows individual whole-brain rs-fMRI maps in one subject at Scan 1 and Scan 2. Average percent difference from Scan 1 to Scan 2 was -8.9% in the motor cortex (range: -28.2 to 1.4%) and 4.4% in the PCC (range: -18.6 to 24.5%).

Discussion

The seed-based reliability presented here represents a “best-case” scenario, utilizing subjects who are acclimated to the scanning environment and produce little motion compared to a patient population. Though we find a high correlation between Time 1 and Time 2, within-subject variation was high in some subjects. Previous reports of periodicity in the rs-fMRI signal may contribute to this variation [9].

Conclusion

Scan-rescan reliability of rs-fMRI at 7T was high in this sample, though some subjects showed high levels of variability across scans.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Cleveland Clinic. The authors gratefully acknowledge technical support by Siemens Medical Solutions.

References

[1] Birn RM, Cornejo MD, Molloy EK, Patriat R, Meier TB, Kirk GR, Nair VA, Meyerand ME, Prabhakaran V. The influence of physiological noise correction on test-retest reliability of resting-state functional connectivity. Brain Connect. 2014 Sep;4(7):511-22. [2] Birn RM, Molloy EK, Patriat R, Parker T, Meier TB, Kirk GR, Nair VA, Meyerand ME, Prabhakaran V. The effect of scan length on the reliability of resting-state fMRI connectivity estimates. Neuroimage. 2013 Dec;83:550-8. [3] Shehzad Z, Kelly AM, Reiss PT, Gee DG, Gotimer K, Uddin LQ, Lee SH, Margulies DS, Roy AK, Biswal BB, Petkova E, Castellanos FX, Milham MP. The resting brain: unconstrained yet reliable. Cereb Cortex. 2009 Oct;19(10):2209-29. [4] Bianciardi M, Fukunaga M, van Gelderen P, Horovitz SG, de Zwart JA, Shmueli K, Duyn JH. Sources of functional magnetic resonance imaging signal fluctuations in the human brain at rest: a 7 T study. Magn Reson Imaging. 2009 Oct;27(8):1019-29. [5] Beall EB and Lowe MJ. SimPACE: generating simulated motion corrupted BOLD data with synthetic-navigated acquisition for the development and evaluation of SLOMOCO: a new, highly effective slicewise motion correction. Neuroimage. 2014 Nov 1;101:21-34. [6] Glover G, Li T, Ress D. Image-Based Method for Retrospective Correction of Physiological Motion Effects in fMRI: RETROICOR. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine 2000;44:162-67. [7] Lowe MJ, Koenig KA, Beall EB, Sakaie KA, Stone L, Bermel R, et al. Anatomic connectivity assessed using pathway radial diffusivity is related to functional connectivity in monosynaptic pathways. Brain Connectivity. 2014;4(7):558-65. [8] Lowe MJ, Mock BJ, Sorenson JA. Functional connectivity in single and multislice echoplanar imaging using resting-state fluctuations. NeuroImage. 1998;7(2):119-32. [9] Choe AS, Jones CK, Joel SE, Muschelli J, Belegu V, Caffo BS, Lindquist MA, van Zijl PC, Pekar JJ. Reproducibility and Temporal Structure in Weekly Resting-State fMRI over a Period of 3.5 Years. PLoS One. 2015 Oct 30;10(10):e0140134.

Figures

Strength of connectivity in the transcallosal motor pathway in eight subjects at two time points.

Rs-fMRI maps of the primary motor cortex from two scans taken in a single subject.



Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 24 (2016)
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