Nonadditive two-way ANOVA for event-related fMRI data analysis

A significant recent development in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the introduction of event-related fMRI, also known as time-resolved fMRI. Because the exact shape of the MR response in an event-related fMRI experiment is often not known, traditional methods developed for block design experiments, such as t test and correlation analysis, are not well-suited for extracting activated pixels from the event-related data. In this work, a statistical technique based on nonadditive two-way analysis of variance is developed for use in event-related studies. Theoretical and experimental work were carried out for establishing a statistical threshold to determine pixel activation. Experimental studies were performed to demonstrate the utility of this approach.