Temporally and spatially constrained ICA of fMRI data analysis

Constrained independent component analysis (CICA) is capable of eliminating the order ambiguity that is found in the standard ICA and extracting the desired independent components by incorporating prior information into the ICA contrast function. However, the current CICA method produces constraints that are based on only one type of prior information (temporal/spatial), which may increase the dependency of CICA on the accuracy of the prior information. To improve the robustness of CICA and to reduce the impact of the accuracy of prior information on CICA, we proposed a temporally and spatially constrained ICA (TSCICA) method that incorporated two types of prior information, both temporal and spatial, as constraints in the ICA. The proposed approach was tested using simulated fMRI data and was applied to a real fMRI experiment using 13 subjects who performed a movement task. Additionally, the performance of TSCICA was compared with the ICA method, the temporally CICA (TCICA) method and the spatially CICA (SCICA) method. The results from the simulation and from the real fMRI data demonstrated that TSCICA outperformed TCICA, SCICA and ICA in terms of robustness to noise. Moreover, the TSCICA method displayed better robustness to prior temporal/spatial information than the TCICA/SCICA method.