Motion correction algorithms may create spurious brain activations in the absence of subject motion

This paper describes several experiments that prove that standard motion correction methods may induce spurious activations in some motion-free fMRI studies. This artifact stems from the fact that activated areas behave like biasing outliers for the difference of square-based measures usually driving such registration methods. This effect is demonstrated first using a motion-free simulated time series including artificial activation-like signal changes. Several additional simulations explore the influence of activation amplitude and extent. The effect is finally highlighted on an actual time series obtained from a 3-T magnet. All the experiments are performed using four different realignment methods, which allows us to show that the problem may be overcome by methods based on a robust similarity measure like mutual information.