Automatic Artifact Removal of Resting-State fMRI with Deep Neural Networks

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a noninvasive technique for studying brain activity. During an fMRI session, the subject executes a set of tasks (task-related fMRI study) or no tasks (resting-state fMRI), and a sequence of 3-D brain images is obtained for further analysis. In the course of fMRI, some sources of activation are caused by noise and artifacts. The removal of these sources is essential before the analysis of the brain activations. Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures can be used for denoising and artifact removal. The main advantage of DNN models is the automatic learning of abstract and meaningful features, given the raw data. This work presents advanced DNN architectures for noise and artifact classification, using both spatial and temporal information in resting-state fMRI sessions. The highest performance is achieved by a voting schema using information from all the domains, with an average accuracy of over 98% and a very good balance between the metrics of sensitivity and specificity (98.5% and 97.5% respectively).