Analysis of fMRI time series with mutual information

Neuroimaging plays a fundamental role in the study of human cognitive neuroscience. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), based on the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent signal, is currently considered as a standard technique for a system level understanding of the human brain. The problem of identifying regionally specific effects in neuroimaging data is usually solved by applying Statistical Parametric mapping (SPM). Here, a mutual information (MI) criterion is used to identify regionally specific effects produced by a task. In particular, two MI estimators are presented for its use in fMRI data. The first one uses a Parzen probability density estimation, and the second one is based on a K Nearest Neighbours (KNN) estimation. Additionally, a statistical measure has been introduced to automatically detect the voxels which are relevant to the fMRI task. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of MI estimators over SPM maps; firstly, providing more significant differences between relevant and irrelevant voxels; secondly, presenting more focalized activation; and, thirdly, detecting small areas related to the task. These findings, and the improved performance of KNN MI estimator in multisubject and multistimuli studies, make the proposed methods a good alternative to SPM. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.