Reproducibility of trial-based functional MRI on motor imagery

The investigation of the reproducibility in functional MRI (fMRI) is an important step in the quantification and analysis of paradigm-related brain activation. This article reports on reproducibility of cortical activation characterized by repeated fMRI runs (10 times) during the performance of a motor imagery and a passive auditory stimulation as a control task. Two parameters, the size of activation and BOLD signal contrast, were measured from regions-of-interest for 10 subjects across different threshold conditions. The variability of these parameters was normalized with respect to the mean obtained from 10 runs, and represented as the intrasession variability. It was found that the variability was significantly lower in the measurement of BOLD signal contrast as compared to the measurement of the size of activation. The variability of the activation volume measurement was greater in the motor imagery task than in the auditory tasks across all thresholds. This task-dependent difference was not apparent from the measurement of the BOLD signal contrast. The presence of threshold dependence in the variability measurement was also examined, but no such dependency was found. The results suggest that a measurement of BOLD signal itself is a more reliable indicator of paradigm-related brain activation during repeated fMRI scans.