Spatial and Temporal Consistency of Brain Networks for different Multi-Echo fMRI Combination Methods

The application of multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies has considerably increased in the last decade due to its superior BOLD sensitivity compared to single-echo fMRI. Various methods have been developed that combine the fMRI time-series derived at different echo times to improve the data quality. Here we evaluated three multi-echo combination schemes, i.e. optimal combination (T2*-weighted), temporal Signal-to-Noise Ratio (tSNR) weighted, and temporal Contrast-to-Noise Ratio (tCNR) weighted combination. For the first time, the effect of these multi-echo combinations on functional resting-state networks was assessed in the temporal and spatial domain, and compared to networks derived from the second echo (35 ms) functional images. Sixteen healthy volunteers were scanned during a 5 minutes resting-state fMRI session. After obtaining the networks, several temporal and spatial metrics were calculated for their time-series and spatial maps. Our results showed that, compared to the second echo network time-series, the Pearson correlation and root mean square error were the most consistent for the optimal combination time-series and the least with those derived from tSNR-weighted combination. The frequency analysis further suggested that the time-series from the tSNR-weighted combination method reduced hardware- and physiological-related artifacts as reflected by the reduced power for the associated frequencies in almost all networks. Moreover, the spatial stability and extent of the networks significantly increased after multi-echo combination, primarily for the optimal combination, followed by the tSNR-weighted combination. The performance of the tCNR-weighted combination lacked robustness and instead varied remarkedly between resting-state networks in both the temporal and spatial domain. The results highlight the benefits of multi-echo sequences on resting-state networks as well as the importance of adjusting the choice of multi-echo combination method to the research question and domain of interest.