One central issue in current functional MRI research is the problem of precisely localizing regions of activation and associating these regions with anatomical labels. Functional MRI data tend to have both a low signal-to-noise ratio and a low spatial resolution compared with conventional structural MRI data. There is also considerable biologically based individual variability in the shape of the brain that is a significant confounding variable in associating the activity seen in functional MRI with a specific brain region, particularly in the cortex. One partial solution to this problem of individual variability transforms individual functional MRI data to an atlas coordinate system in the hope that this transformation will increase the precision of structural-functional co-localization. The purpose of the proposed research is to characterize and quantify the reliability and validity of two distinct approaches for relating functional activation to the anatomical domain. The first approach, adopted by many researchers and exemplified by the SPM software, maps functional MRI data from multiple anatomical coordinate systems directly into an atlas coordinate system. The second approach maps the individual's functional data to that individual's own structural coordinates, to which high-dimensional transformations are applied carrying the structural and function information into the common atlas coordinate system. For decomposing the inherent variability and validity of this approach our own BrainWorks software will be examined and compared to commercially available BrainVoyager software for mapping the functional data to that individual's own structural domain and from the structural domain to an atlas coordinate system.
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