Measuring the effects of motion corruption in fetal fMRI

Irregular and unpredictable fetal movement is the most common cause of artifacts in in utero functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), affecting analysis and limiting our understanding of early functional brain development. The accurate detection of corrupted functional connectivity (FC) resulting from motion artifacts or preprocessing, instead of neural activity, is a prerequisite for reliable and valid analysis of FC and early brain development. Approaches to address this problem in adult data are of limited utility in fetal fMRI. In this study, we evaluate a novel technique for robust computational assessment of motion artifacts, and the quantitative comparison of regression models for artifact removal in fetal FC analysis. It exploits the association between dynamic FC and non-stationarity of fetal movement, to detect residual noise. To validate our motion artifact detection technique in detail, we used a parametric generative model for neural events and fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal. We conducted a systematic evaluation of 11 commonly used regression models in a sample of 70 fetuses with gestational age of 19–39 weeks. Results demonstrate that the proposed method has better accuracy in identifying corrupted FC compared to methods designed for adults. The technique, suggests that censoring, global signal regression and anatomical component-based regression models are the most effective models for compensating motion. The benchmarking technique, and the generative model for realistic fetal fMRI BOLD enables investigators conducting in utero fMRI analysis to effectively quantify the impact of fetal motion and evaluate alternative regression strategies for mitigating this impact. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/cirmuw/fetalfMRIproc.