Correcting cardiorespiratory noise in resting-state functional MRI data acquired in critically ill patients

Resting-state functional MRI is being used to develop diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic biomarkers for critically ill patients with severe brain injuries. In studies of healthy volunteers and non-critically ill patients, prospective cardiorespiratory data are routinely collected to remove non-neuronal fluctuations in the resting-state functional MRI signal during analysis. However, the feasibility and utility of collecting cardiorespiratory data in critically ill patients on a clinical MRI scanner are unknown. We concurrently acquired resting-state functional MRI (repetition time = 1250 ms) and cardiac and respiratory data in 23 critically ill patients with acute severe traumatic brain injury and in 12 healthy control subjects. We compared the functional connectivity results from two approaches that are commonly used to correct cardiorespiratory noise: (i) denoising with cardiorespiratory data (i.e. image-based method for retrospective correction of physiological motion effects in functional MRI) and (ii) standard bandpass filtering. Resting-state functional MRI data in 7 patients could not be analysed due to imaging artefacts. In 6 of the remaining 16 patients (37.5%), cardiorespiratory data were either incomplete or corrupted. In patients (n = 10) and control subjects (n = 10), the functional connectivity results corrected with the image-based method for retrospective correction of physiological motion effects in functional MRI did not significantly differ from those corrected with bandpass filtering of 0.008–0.125 Hz. Collectively, these findings suggest that, in critically ill patients with severe traumatic brain injury, there is limited feasibility and utility to denoising the resting-state functional MRI signal with prospectively acquired cardiorespiratory data.