Imaging Studies May Be Marred by Head Motion

Signatures of brain activity found in individuals with autism could simply be the result of squirmy volunteers, according to a report published 23 July in Neuroimage. The study found that even small head movements inside of a brain scanner can affect results.The first rule of brain scanning is to keep the participant's head as still as possible, because movement can confound the fast-changing measurements of neural activity. But it's impossible for any participant, and especially a child with autism, to keep perfectly still.In the new study, Randy Buckner and colleagues investigated whether head movements affect data gleaned from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technique, which is getting more and more popular among autism researchers, measures synchrony between brain regions while a participant lies passively in the scanner for five to ten minutes.Read more at...SFARI, September 2011.