Partitioning of Physiological Noise Signals in the Brain with Concurrent Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and fMRI

The blood–oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are contaminated with noise from various physiological processes, such as spontaneous low-frequency oscillations (LFOs), respiration, and cardiac pulsation. These processes are coupled to the BOLD signal by different mechanisms, and represent variations with very different frequency content; however, because of the low sampling rate of fMRI, these signals are generally not separable by frequency, as the cardiac and respiratory waveforms alias into the LFO band. In this study, we investigated the spatial and temporal characteristics of the individual noise processes by conducting concurrent near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and fMRI studies on six subjects during a resting state acquisition. Three time series corresponding to LFO, respiration, and cardiac pulsation were extracted by frequency from the NIRS signal (which has sufficient temporal resolution to critically sample the cardiac waveform) and used as regressors in a BOLD fMRI analysis. Our results suggest that LFO and cardiac signals modulate the BOLD signal independently through the circulatory system. The spatiotemporal evolution of the LFO signal in the BOLD data correlates with the global cerebral blood flow. Near-infrared spectroscopy can be used to partition these contributing factors and independently determine their contribution to the BOLD signal.