Measuring eye states in functional MRI

BACKGROUND: In many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, experimental design often depends on the eye state (i.e., whether the participants had their eyes open or closed). Closed eyes during an fMRI is the general convention, particularly when patients are in a resting-state, but the eye state is difficult to verify. Although knowledge of the impact of the eye state on brain activity is steadily growing, only a few research groups have implemented standardized procedures to monitor eye movements and eye state. These procedures involve advanced methods that are costly (e.g., fMRI-compatible cameras) and often time-consuming (e.g., EEG/EOG). RESULTS: We present a simple method that distinguishes open from closed eyes utilizing functional MR images alone. The utility of this method was demonstrated on fMRI data from 14 healthy subjects who had to open and close their eyes according to a predetermined protocol (3.0 T MRI scanner, EPI sequence with 3 × 3 × 3 mm voxels, TR 2.52 s). CONCLUSION: The method presented herein is capable of extracting the movement direction of the eyes. All described methods are applicable for pre- and post-normalized MR images and are freely available through a MATLAB toolbox.