Enhanced phase regression with Savitzky-Golay filtering for high-resolution BOLD fMRI

Phase regression exploits the temporal evolution of phase in individual voxels to suppress blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations caused by larger vessels and draining veins while preserving signal changes from microvascular effects. However, this process does not perform well when phase time series have low signal-to-noise ratios because of high levels of physiological noise. We demonstrate that Savitzky-Golay filters may be used to recover the underlying change in phase and completely restore the efficacy of phase regression. We do not make a priori assumptions regarding phase evolution and perform a data-driven exploration of parameter space to select the Savitzky-Golay filter parameters that minimize temporal variance in each voxel after phase regression. This approach is shown to work well on data acquired with single-shot and multi-shot pulse sequences, and should therefore be useful for both human and animal gradient-echo fMRI at high spatial resolutions at high fields. The ability to improve the spatial specificity of BOLD activation may be especially advantageous for clinical applications of fMRI that rely upon the accuracy of individual subject's activation maps to assist with presurgical planning and clinical decision-making. Enhanced phase regression with Savitzky-Golay filtering may also find other uses in analyses of resting state functional connectivity.