Volume- and surface-based fMRI analysis; Geometric influence of smoothing kernel

Abstract

As improvements in cortical surface modeling allowed accurate cortical topology in brain imaging studies, surface-based methods for the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were introduced to overcome the topological deficiency of commonly used volume-based methods. The difference between the two methods is mainly due to the smoothing techniques applied. In this study, we processed simulated echo planar imaging datasets with each method to present the difference between volume- and surface-based analysis methods to show the influence of smoothing kernels introduced volume- and surface-based fMRI analysis.