title: Effect of slice orientation on reproducibility of fMRI motor activation at 3 Tesla.
abstract: The effect of slice orientation on reproducibility and sensitivity of 3T fMRI activation using a motor task has been investigated in six normal volunteers. Four slice orientations were used; axial, oblique axial, coronal and sagittal. We applied analysis of variance (ANOVA) to suprathreshold voxel statistics to quantify variability in activation between orientations and between subjects. We also assessed signal detection accuracy in voxels across the whole brain by using a finite mixture model to fit receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to the data. Preliminary findings suggest that suprathreshold cluster characteristics demonstrate high motor reproducibility across subjects and orientations, although a significant difference between slice orientations in number of activated voxels was demonstrated in left motor cortex but not cerebellum. Subtle inter-orientation differences are highlighted in the ROC analyses, which are not obvious by ANOVA; the oblique axial slice orientation offers the highest signal detection accuracy, whereas coronal slices give the lowest.
authors.affiliation: Herchel Smith Laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry, School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gustard
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fadili
authors.forename: E J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.forename: L D
authors.initials: LD
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.forename: T A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Carpenter
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brett
authors.forename: E T
authors.initials: ET
authors.lastname: Bullmore
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D009044:Motor Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D012372:ROC Curve; D015203:Reproducibility of Results