Impact of realignment on spinal functional MRI time series

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the spinal cord produces dataset that are particularly noisy because of cardiac-related motions. Realignment methods allowing subject motion correction might be sensitive to such noisy dataset. By realigning and quantifying cardiac variance on spinal dataset, we showed that such procedures decrease cardiac noise within the volumes. This has a direct and positive impact on functional imaging when estimating the T-score by means of the general linear model.