Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 154, 1 July 2017, Pages 255-266
NeuroImage

Denoising spinal cord fMRI data: Approaches to acquisition and analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.09.065Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We describe problems faced when acquiring functional data from the human spinal cord.

  • We discuss different model-based and data-driven approaches to correct these problems.

  • We provide an outlook on other correction techniques that might be useful in the cord.

Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human spinal cord is a difficult endeavour due to the cord's small cross-sectional diameter, signal drop-out as well as image distortion due to magnetic field inhomogeneity, and the confounding influence of physiological noise from cardiac and respiratory sources. Nevertheless, there is great interest in spinal fMRI due to the spinal cord's role as the principal sensorimotor interface between the brain and the body and its involvement in a variety of sensory and motor pathologies. In this review, we give an overview of the various methods that have been used to address the technical challenges in spinal fMRI, with a focus on reducing the impact of physiological noise. We start out by describing acquisition methods that have been tailored to the special needs of spinal fMRI and aim to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and reduce distortion in obtained images. Following this, we concentrate on image processing and analysis approaches that address the detrimental effects of noise. While these include variations of standard pre-processing methods such as motion correction and spatial filtering, the main focus lies on denoising techniques that can be applied to task-based as well as resting-state data sets. We review both model-based approaches that rely on externally acquired respiratory and cardiac signals as well as data-driven approaches that estimate and correct for noise using the data themselves. We conclude with an outlook on techniques that have been successfully applied for noise reduction in brain imaging and whose use might be beneficial for fMRI of the human spinal cord.

Introduction

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the spinal cord is still at a relatively early stage. While the first reports of spinal fMRI appeared in the late 1990s (human imaging: Stroman et al., 1999; Yoshizawa et al., 1996; animal imaging: Pórszász et al., 1997), the field is still relatively small – there are currently about 100 published reports in humans and less than 50 in animals on spinal imaging with fMRI. In this review we will solely focus on the human spinal imaging literature, although exciting advances have been made with regard to spinal imaging in rats (e.g. Lawrence et al., 2004; Lilja et al., 2006; Zhao et al., 2009), cats (Cohen-Adad et al., 2009a), and very recently also in monkeys (Chen et al., 2015, Yang et al., 2015), where fine-grained sensory processing patterns were investigated as well as changes in resting-state connectivity due to spinal cord injury. It will be exciting to see how these approaches develop, especially when considering their application in tandem with other techniques such as two-photon imaging (Johanssen and Helmchen, 2013) or optogenetics (Montgomery et al., 2016).

A likely reason for the relative dearth of spinal fMRI studies lies in the difficulty of obtaining reliable results from this structure, which is due to a number of factors (Giove et al., 2004, Stroman, 2005, Stroman et al., 2014, Summers et al., 2010). First of all, the spinal cord has a very small cross-sectional diameter (approximately 12mm in the left-right and 8mm in the anterior-posterior direction at the cervical level; Fradet et al., 2014; Ko et al., 2004), which makes it necessary to use a high in-plane resolution to minimize partial-volume effects. Second, the presence of tissue-types with different magnetic susceptibility (vertebrae and connective tissue) leads to inhomogeneities in the static magnetic field (B0) that result in a periodic signal disruption along the superior-inferior axis of the spinal cord (Cooke et al., 2004, Finsterbusch et al., 2012). Third, the influence of physiological noise (arising from respiratory and cardiovascular sources; Fig. 1) on blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses is much stronger in the spinal cord than in the brain (Cohen-Adad et al., 2010, Piché et al., 2009), with the potential for obscuring task-related responses and resting-state connectivity profiles, unless adequately addressed.

With regards to the sources of physiological noise, one can dissociate respiratory and cardiac influences (though interactions are also observed; Brooks et al., 2008). Respiratory influences are mostly evident in time-dependent distortions of the B0 field time-locked to the respiratory cycle (Raj et al., 2001) – these manifest as apparent non-rigid motion of the spinal cord and are much stronger than in the brain due to the spinal cord's proximity to the lungs (Verma and Cohen-Adad, 2014). Cardiac influences manifest themselves in vascular pulsations (Dagli et al., 1999) on the one hand, which might obscure spinal cord BOLD responses since the main arteries and veins run directly along the edge of the cord in close proximity to the minute grey matter regions of interest (Cohen-Adad et al., 2010). On the other hand, cardiac activity leads to pulsatile movement of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF; O’Connell, 1943) in which the spinal cord is embedded, resulting in a non-rigid oscillatory cord motion time-locked to the cardiac cycle (Figley and Stroman, 2007). Cardiac induced CSF flow furthermore leads to large signal variations due to unsaturated spins moving into an imaging slice (Finsterbusch et al., 2012), which is highly problematic considering the proximity of the CSF-containing subarachnoid space to the spinal cord grey matter.

In spite of all these difficulties, there is great interest in studying the human spinal cord non-invasively, since it is the brain's principal sensorimotor interface with the body – thus properly characterising input to and output from the central nervous system relies on knowledge of spinal cord activity. Furthermore, there is also strong clinical interest in the spinal cord, due to its prominent involvement in a number of neurological disorders (Wheeler-Kingshott et al., 2014). For example, in multiple sclerosis, deficits in motor function may be due to dysfunction at multiple levels of the neuro-axis, and early spinal cord involvement in the primary progressive form of the disease has recently been demonstrated (Abdel-Aziz et al., 2015). Equally, damage occurring to motor neurons in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have been shown to involve both the cortico-spinal tract and the spinal cord (Foerster et al., 2013). In patients with spinal cord injury the motivation to study the cord is clear and current interest includes relating cord atrophy to disability and monitoring treatment success (Cadotte and Fehlings, 2013, Freund et al., 2013), though imaging presents unique challenges due to the use of metal in stabilising the vertebral column. Lastly, the development and maintenance of chronic pain states in animal models has been shown to depend on altered spinal cord function (Woolf and Salter, 2000) and spinal cord fMRI would allow researchers to examine whether similar changes underlie the transition to chronic pain in man.

Here we set out to give an overview of approaches that have been used to overcome some of the aforementioned problems. We will first look at how one can optimise the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) during image acquisition, based on a variety of methods not routinely used in brain imaging. Then we will move on to describe the analysis approaches that have been developed to deal with the various sources of noise present in spinal fMRI data – here we will also mention differences when denoising task-based versus resting-state data. We will briefly mention various motion correction and spatial filtering approaches before concentrating on the main topic of denoising using either modelling approaches based on externally acquired signals (cardiac and respiratory data) or data-driven approaches that aim to find structured noise in the data that is then used in clean-up procedures. We will conclude with an outlook on procedures that have proven helpful for denoising brain fMRI data and might hold potential for spinal fMRI as well.

Section snippets

Acquisition approaches to denoising

Before coming to acquisition methods that optimize the SNR in the spinal cord, it is important to briefly review the gross anatomy and vascular supply of the spinal cord (Baron, 2015, Silverdale, 2015, Thron, 2016). From the superior to inferior (rostral to caudal) direction, the spinal cord is organized into cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral, and cogzygeal parts; hereafter we will focus on studies of the cervical spinal cord as this part has received the greatest attention. Each of these

Data inspection and motion correction

A crucial first step to analysing spinal fMRI data is visual inspection of the recorded time series data – this might highlight problems such as large movements (e.g. induced by swallowing) or increases in background noise (e.g. ghosting) that affect discrete volumes. In these situations, there are several approaches to deal with the affected volumes, such as replacing the affected volumes by the average of its neighbours, replacing the affected volumes by the time-series average, using

Outlook

In closing, we would like to highlight a few approaches that have shown beneficial effects for noise reduction in the brain. Since many of the problems that these approaches aim to ameliorate exist in the spinal cord to a larger degree, their application to spinal fMRI might be of significant benefit.

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