Effects of heart rate, respiratory flow, cardiac pulsatility and breathing motion on resting-state fMRI

Description: Correlation maps showing the brain regions that are affected by the following physiological processes: 1. Heart rate, 2. Respiratory flow (related to breathing rate and depth) 3. Cardiac pulsatility, and 4. Breathing motion. In our study (Kassinopoulos and Mitsis, 2019), we propose a new method for estimating the physiological response functions (PRF) in order to account for the effect of changes in heart rate and breathing pattern during the fMRI scan. The PRF_sc curves estimated using our approach explain significantly larger fraction of variance in the fMRI data compared to the canonical PRF curves (PRF_stand) reported in the literature (see for example the group maps r_PRF_sc_group.nii.gz vs r_PRF_stand_group.nii.gz from this collection). The Matlab codes for our method can be found at: https://github.com/mkassinopoulos/PRF_estimation Reference: Kassinopoulos, M., Mitsis, G.D., 2019. Identification of Physiological Response Functions to Correct for Fluctuations in Resting-State fMRI related to Heart Rate and Respiration. bioRxiv 512855. https://doi.org/10.1101/512855