Temporally constrained ICA with threshold and its application to fMRI data

BACKGROUND: Although independent component analysis (ICA) has been widely applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to reveal spatially independent brain networks, the order indetermination of ICA leads to the problem of target component selection. The temporally constrained independent component analysis (TCICA) is capable of automatically extracting the desired spatially independent components by adding the temporal prior information of the task to the mixing matrix for fMRI data analysis. However, the TCICA method can only extract a single component that tends to be a mix of multiple task-related components when there exist several independent components related to one task. METHODS: In this study, we proposed a TCICA with threshold (TCICA-Thres) method that performed TCICA outside the threshold and performed FastICA inside the threshold to automatically extract all the target components related to one task. The proposed approach was tested using simulated fMRI data and was applied to a real fMRI experiment using 13 subjects. Additionally, the performance of TCICA-Thres was compared with that of FastICA and TCICA. RESULTS: The results from the simulation and the fMRI data demonstrated that TCICA-Thres better extracted the task-related components than TCICA. Moreover, TCICA-Thres outperformed FastICA in robustness to noise, spatial detection power and computational time. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed TCICA-Thres solves the limitations of TCICA and extends the application of TCICA in fMRI data analysis. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12880-018-0300-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.