A comparison on the magnitude and complex-valued methods to detect the brain activation, application to functional MRI

In functional MRI studies, the significant brain activation is determined using the magnitude-only time series ramework after the image reconstruction. Although this method is very popular, the information of the phase part is ignored. Most recently, a novel strategy for determining the significant brain activation is proposed which considers the magnitude and phase parts of the data simultaneously. This approach affects the quality of reconstructed image and the power of the statistical tests. In this study, the significant brain activation achieved using the complex- and magnitude-valued approaches were evaluated.