Interaction of Developmental Venous Anomalies with Resting-State Functional MRI Measures

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Vascular Neurology
• Functional Neuroimaging

Background:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures brain activity via blood oxygenation.
• fMRI signals are vulnerable to noise from vascular sources.
• Developmental venous anomalies (DVAs) are common vascular variants.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if DVAs can be misinterpreted as neural signals in fMRI.
• To assess the potential for DVAs to bias fMRI findings.

Main Methods:

• Identified 14 DVAs in 814 participants from a neuroimaging cohort.
• Applied independent component analysis (ICA) to resting-state fMRI data.
• Searched for ICA components spatially matching DVA topography.

Main Results:

• DVAs were present in 17 ICA components.
• 10 DVAs were clearly identified.
• Components showed venous (52.9%), motion (11.8%), partial neural (11.8%), or clear neural (29.4%) signal patterns.

Conclusions:

• DVAs can strongly resemble neural signals in fMRI.
• DVAs pose a potential bias in fMRI analyses, particularly in cortical regions.
• ICA-based denoising can address DVA confounds in large-scale studies.