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Section: New Software and Platforms

PyHRF

Keywords: Medical imaging - Health - Brain - IRM - Neurosciences - Statistic analysis - FMRI

Scientific Description: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that allows the non-invasive study of brain function. It is based on the hemodynamic variations induced by changes in cerebral synaptic activity following sensory or cognitive stimulation. The measured signal depends on the variation of blood oxygenation level (BOLD signal) which is related to brain activity: a decrease in deoxyhemoglobin concentration induces an increase in BOLD signal. The BOLD signal is delayed with respect to changes in synaptic activity, which can be modeled as a convolution with the Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF) whose exact form is unknown and fluctuates with various parameters such as age, brain region or physiological conditions. In this work we propose to analyze fMRI data using a Joint Detection-Estimation (JDE) approach. It jointly detects cortical activation and estimates the HRF. In contrast to existing tools, PyHRF estimates the HRF instead of considering it as a given constant in the entire brain.

Functional Description: As part of fMRI data analysis, PyHRF provides a set of tools for addressing the two main issues involved in intra-subject fMRI data analysis : (i) the localization of cerebral regions that elicit evoked activity and (ii) the estimation of the activation dynamics also referenced to as the recovery of the Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF). To tackle these two problems, PyHRF implements the Joint Detection-Estimation framework (JDE) which recovers parcel-level HRFs and embeds an adaptive spatio-temporal regularization scheme of activation maps.

News Of The Year: The framework to perform software tests has been further developed. Some unitary tests have been set.