Quality control in functional MRI studies with MRIQC and fMRIPrep

Palais 

This presentation will demonstrate a protocol for the quality control (QC) of resting state and task functional MRI studies involving two checkpoints. The first checkpoint entails assessing the quality of the unprocessed data using MRIQC visual report. Second, for the data that surpassed this first checkpoint, the second checkpoint entails assessing the results of minimal preprocessing using the fMRIPrep visual reports. We will discuss why setting QC checkpoints at several steps of the preprocessing is important. Moreover, we will describe how the overall application scope (that is, the intended use of the data) determines how QC is carried out and defines the exclusion criteria for anatomical (T1-weighted; T1w) and functional (blood-oxygen dependent-level; BOLD) images at the two QC checkpoints accordingly. With this talk, we aim to promote best practices in QA/QC and help researchers implement their protocols for functional MRI more effectively.