A retrospective physiological noise correction method for oscillating steady-state imaging

Oscillating steady-state imaging (OSSI) is an SNR-efficient steady-state sequence with $$ sensitivity suitable for FMRI. Due to the frequency sensitivity of the signal, respiration- and drift-induced field changes can create unwanted signal fluctuations. This study aims to address this issue by developing retrospective signal correction methods that utilize OSSI signal properties to denoise task-based OSSI FMRI experiments.

A retrospective denoising approach was developed that leverages the unique signal properties of OSSI to perform denoising without a manually specified noise region of interest and works with both voxel timecourses (oscillating steady-state correction [OSSCOR]) or FID timecourses (F-OSSCOR). Simulations were performed to estimate the number of principal components optimal for denoising. In vivo experiments at 3 T field strength were conducted to compare the performance of proposed methods against a standard principal component analysis-based method, measured using mean t score within an region of interest, number of activations, and mean temporal SNR.

Correction using OSSCOR was significantly better than the standard method in all metrics. Correction using F-OSSCOR was not significantly different from the standard method using an equal number of principal components. Increasing the number of OSSCOR principal components decreased activation strength and increased the number of suspected false positives. However, increasing the number of principal components in F-OSSCOR increased activation strength with little to no increase in false activation.

Both OSSCOR and F-OSSCOR substantially reduce physiological noise components and increase temporal SNR, improving the functional results of task-based OSSI functional experiments. F-OSSCOR demonstrates a proof of concept utilization of coil-localized FID signal information for physiological noise correction.