Functional MRI Overview

Types of functional MRI sequences

Basic steps in an fMRI analysis

1. Assess the quality of the data via visual inspection and some sort of timeseries analysis.
2. Realign the functional images to correct for participant motion in the scanner (in SPM “realign”, in FSL “motion correction”).
3. Bring the structural image into the same space as the functional images (coregistration).
4. Register the structural image to a common space (e.g., through unified segmentation in SPM).
5. Apply the warping parameters obtained for the structural image to each functional image.
6. Smooth the images.
7. Perform statistical analyses on the smoothed, normalized functional images.