Measurement information processing in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is one of the main techniques for the in vivo diagnosis of physiological and psychological diseases. During the data acquisition, alterations may intervene causing uncertainty in the diagnosis. Therefore, many preprocessing techniques are developed to reduce the alteration effects. Since today there is no consensus on standard procedure to perform the fMRI preprocessing, many correction techniques and evaluation metrics are used. The different preprocessing procedures give different information to the clinicians. Different diagnosis will be provided if the used preprocessing procedure is not completely known and then the preprocessed data are not correctly interpreted. The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the fMRI preprocessing procedures in order to stimulate the interest of the scientific community (i) to develop and experiment new and advanced techniques for efficiency and accuracy improvement, and (ii) to attain an unified procedure.