A novel local PCA-Based method for detecting activation signals in fMRI

A novel local principal component analysis (LPCA) technique is presented for activation signal detection in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) without explicit knowledge about the shape of the model activation signal. Unlike the traditional PCA methods, our LPCA algorithm is based on a measure of separation between two clusters formed by the signal segments in active periods and inactive periods, which is computed in an eigen-subspace. In addition, we only applied PCA to the temporal sequence of each individual voxel instead of applying PCA to the fMRI data set. In our algorithm, we first applied a linear regression procedure to alleviate the baseline drift artifact. Then, the baseline-corrected temporal signals were partitioned into active and inactive segments according to the paradigm used for the fMRI data acquisition. Principal components were computed from all these segments for each voxel by PCA. By projecting the segments of each voxel onto a linear subspace formed by the corresponding most dominant principal components, two separate clusters were formed from active and inactive segments. An activation measure was defined based on the degree of separation between these two clusters in the projection space. We show experimental results on the activation signal detection from various sets of fMRI data with different types of stimulation by using the proposed LPCA algorithm and the standard t-test method for comparison. Our experiments indicate that the LPCA algorithm in general provides substantial signal-to-noise ratio improvement over the t-test method.