As shown in Figure 1A and C, the overlay maps of the aforementioned two regions extend far beyond their borders (the red curve shows the border of two regions in the atlas) even after spatial normalization. This simple example clearly demonstrates the poor performance of the prevailing spatial normalization method for fMRI data analysis in aging research. Figure 1 Color-coded overlay maps of (A) hippocampus and (C) precuneus regions on MNI152

brain atlas after statistical parametric mapping Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (SPM)8 spatial normalization. Color-coded overlay maps of (B) hippocampus and (D) precuneus regions on MNI152 brain atlas … It is common to apply a strong spatial smoothing on the fMRI data in order to compensate for the inaccuracy in spatial normalization. Even though smoothing reduces the rate of false positives, it also reduces the likelihood of detecting true positive. Nonetheless, in studies comparing young and old brains, even strong Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical smoothing cannot compensate for the error introduced by spatial normalization due to the extent of the atrophied elders’ brain. For instance,

Figure 2A shows a Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 63-year-old healthy female participant’s brain in our data set, illustrating atrophy exceeding the kernel size of any smoothing filter used in fMRI analysis. Another potential problem of spatial smoothing is that it makes it more difficult to segregate regions that are located close to each other. For instance, regions close to the middle hemispheric plane (i.e., left and right posterior Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical cingulate) have to be treated as a single region. In fact, in the prevailing method of functional connectivity analysis with spatial normalization, it is a common practice to place the

seed exactly on the middle plane and average all voxels’ signal within a sphere centered by that seed. This subsequently forces interhemispheric averaging in the analysis of resting-state BOLD fMRI data. In addition, a recent study (Smith et al. 2011) showed that time series in atlas-based seed ROI’s derived after spatial normalization and not from native space data are extremely Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical damaging to the DMN estimations. Figure 2 The typical atrophy in a healthy 63-year-old female participant’s brain in a T1 scan, (A) FreeSurfer extracted cortical and selleck chemicals subcortical ROI borders overlaid on the T1 scan; (B) FMRI reference Entinostat image overlaid on (A) after intermodal registration using FLIRT. … To address these issues, we analyzed fMRI data in selleckchem subjects’ native space, which substitutes the spatial normalization and subsequent smoothing. Analyzing fMRI data in subjects’ native space requires a highly accurate method for reliably identifying neuroanatomical regions in fMRI image for every subject in the study, often referred to as fMRI localization (Gholipour et al. 2007). Direct fMRI localization is challenging as the overall brain structures are not clearly visible in fMRI scans.