Study of temporal stationarity and spatial consistency of fMRI noise using independent component analysis

Spatial independent component analysis (ICA) was used to study the temporal stationarity and spatial consistency of structured functional MRI (fMRI) noise. Spatial correlations have been used in the past to generate filters for the removal of structured noise for each time-course in an fMRI dataset. It would be beneficial to produce a multivariate filter based on the same principles. ICA is examined to determine if it has properties that are beneficial for this type of filtering. Six fMRI baseline datasets were decomposed via spatial ICA. The time-courses associated with each component were tested for wide-sense stationarity using the wide sense stationarity quotient (WSS). Each dataset was divided into three subsets and each subset was decomposed. The components of first and third subset were matched by the strength of their correlation. The components produced by ICA were found to have largely nonstationary time-courses. Despite the temporal nonstationarity in the data, ICA was found to produce consistent spatial components. The degree of correlation among components differed depending on the amount of dimension reduction performed on the data. It was found that a relatively small number of dimensions produced components that are potentially useful for generating a spatial fMRI filter.