Effective Preprocessing Procedures Virtually Eliminate Distance-Dependent Motion Artifacts in Resting State FMRI

Artifactual sources of resting-state (RS) FMRI can originate from head motion, physiology, and hardware. Of these sources, motion has received considerable attention and was found to induce corrupting effects by differentially biasing correlations between regions depending on their distance. Numerous corrective approaches have relied on the identification and censoring of high-motion time points and the use of the brain-wide average time series as a nuisance regressor to which the data are orthogonalized (Global Signal Regression, GSReg). We first replicate the previously reported head-motion bias on correlation coefficients using data generously contributed by Power et al. (2012). We then show that while motion can be the source of artifact in correlations, the distance-dependent bias-taken to be a manifestation of the motion effect on correlation-is exacerbated by the use of GSReg. Put differently, correlation estimates obtained after GSReg are more susceptible to the presence of motion and by extension to the levels of censoring. More generally, the effect of motion on correlation estimates depends on the preprocessing steps leading to the correlation estimate, with certain approaches performing markedly worse than others. For this purpose, we consider various models for RS FMRI preprocessing and show that WMeLOCAL, as subset of the ANATICOR discussed by Jo et al. (2010), denoising approach results in minimal sensitivity to motion and reduces by extension the dependence of correlation results on censoring.