A novel method for spatio-temporal pattern analysis of brain fMRI data

A novel data processing procedure for fMRI was suggested in this paper, by which spatial and temporal characteristics of stimuli-induced signal dynamic responses can be investigated simultaneously. First the multitaper spectral estimation was utilized to estimate the spectrum of each voxel; the significance of the line frequency components at the interested frequency was tested to detect the task-related cortex areas; the temporal independent component analysis (tICA) was then applied to the activated voxels to obtain stimuli-induced signal dynamic responses. The advantages of this procedure are: few assumptions are needed for the cerebral hemodynamics and spatial distribution of task-related areas, problems which often appear in tICA analysis of fMRI data, such as the lack of stability, reliability and robustness, are overcome by the suggested method.