multiband acquisition sequence testing: timecourses

This post is about timecourses found in our multiband acquisition sequence testing; see the previous post for the introduction and following for respiration recordings. The HCP MOTOR task is good for these tests since the expected effects are clear: left hand movement should cause strong activation in right M1, etc. The plots for one ROI are in this post; plots for hand and visual parcels in each hemisphere are in this pdf. Note also that averaging voxel timecourses within parcels somewhat corrects for the different voxel size (and presumably signal) associated with each acquisition: the number of voxels in each parcel for each acquisition is given in the plot titles (e.g., for parcel 3 below, there are 275 voxels at MB8, 180 at MB4, and 73 at MB0).

The black line in these plots is the average timecourse for Gordon parcel 3, part of the SMmouthL community, at our three test acquisitions (timecourses extracted from preprocessed images). This  parcel should be most responsive to the tongue-moving task (green blocks). Task-related activity is indeed apparent with all sequences, but superimposed oscillations are also apparent (which sort of look like the HCP data), particularly at MB8. By eye, it's harder to separate the task-related activation with the MB8 sequence, which is worrying for our event-related analyses.

 

Not wanting to visually mistake the difference in sampling frequency for a smoother signal, I resampled the MB8 timeseries to match the MB4 frequency, shown below (second section of the pdf). Downsampling does reduce the visual difference between the signals, but by eye, MB4 generally still has a clearer signal.

The magnitude of the oscillation varies with acquisition: greatest in MB8, then MB4, and smallest in MB0. The movement regressors (from the HCP pipelines for MB8 and MB4, from SPM for MB0) are shown in light colors on the plots (first column green, second blue, third pink). The oscillation in the activation timecourses looks to be clearly related to the oscillation in the movement lines, which in turn is related to respiration (examples of respiration recordings in the next post, as well as this previous post). An effect of respiration on BOLD is expected and known for a long time; the problem here is that the effect seems larger in magnitude, and perhaps higher in MB8 than MB4. By my eye, the magnitude of the oscillation doesn't appear totally consistent effect across the brain, making it potentially harder to model out post-processing; but this variation is simply my impression so far.

I'm happy to share volumes, etc. if any of you have ideas for additional analyses or want to explore further, and appreciate any thoughts. The preprocessing pipelines also generated surface versions of the files, which I am unlikely to be able to look at any time soon.