Announcing the availability of two new publications in collaboration with the SPiN lab, lead by Cesar Caballero-Gaudes at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in Spain! Both focus on the preprocessing and analysis of breath-hold fMRI data to measure cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) and hemodynamic lag:

BCBL PhD student Stefano Moia and ANVIL postdoc Rachael Stickland co-authored an IEEE paper describing our lagged Generalized Linear Model approach for estimating the temporal delay between systemic carbon dioxide changes and the local BOLD fMRI response, mapping CVR and lag at the voxel level. The approach simultaneously fits other fMRI confounds, such as head motion, to better isolate the physiologic effects of interest. Download the pdf here!

Using the BCBL EuskalIBUR dataset, which uniquely studies breath-hold CVR across 10 repeated weekly MRI sessions, a new preprint in BioRxiv demonstrates the benefits of multi-echo data and compares multi-echo ICA denoising strategies for reliably mapping CVR and lag. Download the pdf here!

CVR maps for an example subject, scanned weekly for 10 weeks. Each row reflects a different use of multi-echo fMRI data, either combining information across the echo times or using the relationship across echo times and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to differentiate the CVR effects from highly collinear noise confounds.