Optimal signal recovery from interleaved FMRI data

Due to the nature of fMRI acquisition protocols, slices in the plane of acquisition are not acquired simultaneously or sequentially, and therefore are temporally misaligned with each other. Slice timing correction (STC) is a critical preprocessing step that corrects for this misalignment. STC is applied in all major software packages. To date, little effort has gone towards assessing the optimal method of STC. In this study, we examine the most popular methods of STC, and propose a new optimal method based on the fundamental properties of sampling theory. We evaluate this method using 20 simulated fMRI data and demonstrate the utility of STC in general as well as the superiority of the proposed method in comparison to existing ones.