PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Leyla Tarhan
AU  - Talia Konkle
TI  - Reliability-Based Voxel Selection
AID  - 10.1101/703603
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 703603
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/16/703603.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/16/703603.full
AB  - While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies typically measure responses across the whole brain, not all regions are likely to be informative for a given study. Which voxels should be considered? Here we propose a method for voxel selection based on the reliability of the data. This method isolates voxels that respond consistently across imaging runs while maximizing the reliability of multi-voxel patterns across the selected voxels, and is suitable for designs with at least 15 conditions. In two example datasets, we found that this proposed method defines a set of voxels that has a higher average multi-voxel pattern reliability compared to another common method, activity-based voxel selection. Broadly, this method has the advantage that there is no need to define regions or statistical thresholds a priori and puts the focus on data reliability as the first step in analyzing fMRI data.