Evaluating multi-echo based denoising strategies for breath-hold induced cerebrovascular reactivity mapping

摘要

Introduction: Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) is the ability of brain vessels to respond to vasoactive substances such as endogenous CO_2. It can be induced with Breath-Holds (BH) and measured with BOLD fMRI [1]. However, BH is a task intrinsically time-locked with motion-related artefacts, potentially biasing CVR estimation and reducing its reliability. Multi-echo (ME) fMRI can improve reliability and repeatability of BH-induced CVR via optimal combination (optcom) [2], and denoising with ME Independent Component Analysis (ME-ICA) [3]. This work evaluates the performance of single echo, optcom and ME-ICA preprocessing to diminish taskcorrelated artefacts and obtain more reliable CVR mapping.