respiration and movement: more experiences

Annika Linke, a postdoc at SDSU, contacted me, reporting that she's also seen oscillations in multiband acquisitions, with a Siemens Trio and Prisma, plus a GE Discovery. She kindly sent examples of her findings, and allowed me to share and describe a few of them here. More examples can be downloaded here and here.

Annika ran a multiband 8 sequence on a GE 3T Discovery MR750 scanner (UCSD CFMRI; TR = 800 msec, mb_factor 8, 32 channel head coil, 2 x 2 x 2 mm voxels; AP - PA encoding directions), and also saw prominent oscillations in the motion regressors, linked to respiration:

The subject was sleeping in this scan, and periodically stopped breathing. The movement in the motion regressors stopped and starts with the abnormal breathing periods, very similar to the traces from the purposeful breath-holding experiment we ran. I was also struck by the size of the oscillations in the movement regressors: somewhere between 0.5 and 1 mm, which neatly matches the size of the larger oscillations we've seen. Annika has results for an awake adult and toddlers, all of whom show oscillations (particularly in the A-P (y) and I-S (z) axes); see this pdf. These comparisons suggest the oscillation magnitude is not directly related to participant weight: the toddler and adult magnitudes are similar, though toddlers of course are smaller and have a faster respiration rate.

Here are some motion regressors Annika collected on a different scanner (Siemens 3T Prisma at Robarts Research Institute, Western University; CMRR release 10b, VD13D, 64 channel head coil, 3 x 3 x 3 mm voxels), at different MB factors. The oscillation is in all runs, though lowest amplitude with MB1.  

Finally, here's a set of motion regressors collected on a Trio at MB2 (ipat2 acceleration, 2 mm voxels, TR=1300 msec, AP/PA phase encoding directions, Robarts Research Institute, Western University). Each subplot is a run from a different person. All again have oscillations mostly in the y and z directions, though the magnitude is less than the MB8 plots above.

Annika's results make it clear that the magnitude of the oscillations in the motion regressors is not due to some weird fluke with our scanner, but rather some aspect of the multiband sequences (or some related factor, such as reconstruction, etc.); hopefully these additional examples will help us understand what's going on.