Mixed Spectrum Analysis on fMRI Time-Series

Temporal autocorrelation present in functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) data poses challenges to its analysis. The existing approaches handling autocorrelation in fMRI time-series often presume a specific model of autocorrelation such as an auto-regressive model. The main limitation here is that the correlation structure of voxels is generally unknown and varies in different brain regions because of different levels of neurogenic noises and pulsatile effects. Enforcing a universal model on all brain regions leads to bias and loss of efficiency in the analysis. In this paper, we propose the mixed spectrum analysis of the voxel time-series to separate the discrete component corresponding to input stimuli and the continuous component carrying temporal autocorrelation. A mixed spectral analysis technique based on M-spectral estimator is proposed, which effectively removes autocorrelation effects from voxel time-series and identify significant peaks of the spectrum. As the proposed method does not assume any prior model for the autocorrelation effect in voxel time-series, varying correlation structure among the brain regions does not affect its performance. We have modified the standard M-spectral method for an application on a spatial set of time-series by incorporating the contextual information related to the continuous spectrum of neighborhood voxels, thus reducing considerably the computation cost. Likelihood of the activation is predicted by comparing the amplitude of discrete component at stimulus frequency of voxels across the brain by using normal distribution and modeling spatial correlations among the likelihood with a conditional random field. We also demonstrate the application of the proposed method in detecting other desired frequencies.