The development of event-related fMRI designs

The diversity of experimental designs that can be used with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has played a key role in its widespread application to studies of human cognition. This flexibility is possible because the fMRI response to external stimuli is remarkably well approximated as the response of a linear time variant system. The experimental demonstration of this property provided the foundation for the development of event-related designs, in which the fMRI response is modeled as the linear summation of the hemodynamic response to discrete events. Building upon prior work from the fields of engineering, neuroscience, and statistics, researchers in the field have created a rich collection of event-related designs and developed a rigorous theoretical framework for characterizing and optimizing the performance of designs. Ongoing challenges include the optimization of designs in the presence of experimental constraints and the development of more time-efficient optimization algorithms.