Quality control in resting-state fMRI: the benefits of visual inspection

BACKGROUND: A variety of quality control (QC) approaches are employed in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to determine data quality and ultimately inclusion or exclusion of a fMRI data set in group analysis. Reliability of rs-fMRI data can be improved by censoring or “scrubbing” volumes affected by motion. While censoring preserves the integrity of participant-level data, including excessively censored data sets in group analyses may add noise. Quantitative motion-related metrics are frequently reported in the literature; however, qualitative visual inspection can sometimes catch errors or other issues that may be missed by quantitative metrics alone. In this paper, we describe our methods for performing QC of rs-fMRI data using software-generated quantitative and qualitative output and trained visual inspection. RESULTS: The data provided for this QC paper had relatively low motion-censoring, thus quantitative QC resulted in no exclusions. Qualitative checks of the data resulted in limited exclusions due to potential incidental findings and failed pre-processing scripts. CONCLUSION: Visual inspection in addition to the review of quantitative QC metrics is an important component to ensure high quality and accuracy in rs-fMRI data analysis.