Insights newsletter - September 7, 2023
Quality control
Welcome to our bi-weekly insights letter, where we keep you in the loop on the latest developments, exciting milestones, and progress in creating our cutting-edge software. We appreciate your continued support and are thrilled to share our journey with you. Here's a snapshot of what's been happening:
Important regulatory notice:
This newsletter reflects our current development plans for nordicMEDiVA. Some options and features displayed are pending 510(k) submission and may not be available for sale in the United States
Image quality control
Quality assessment is vital to ensure a high reliability of fMRI studies. There are different procedures that can be followed in order to guarantee the best results. Here's what we're working on in nordicMEDiVA:
Coregistration
Signal-intensity analysis
Motion correction
Cerebrovascular reactivity analysis
Feature Insight
Co-registration
Interpretation of fMRI data depends on accurate alignment of the EPI series to the anatomical T1 series in order to co-localize the BOLD activation to the appropriate cortical regions. The QIBA Profile for fMRI studies is a good resource to refer to for the implementation of best practices for performing fMRI studies. With nordicMEDiVA, we align to the QIBA recommendations in the fMRI post-processing workflow.
nordicMEDiVA provides the ability to:
Perform a visual verification of alignment between functional and structural images, supported by opacity adjustments, application of different palettes and checkerboard options;
Manually align the images and adjust translation and rotation values. This can be done to either overwrite the automatic alignment, or to kick-off a new automatic co-registration process.
Our goal is to help you provide the most reliable and accurate results. That's why co-registration is a mandatory step in the workflow. We make it easy to differentiate images that are co-registered from those that are not.
Signal-intensity analysis
Add regions of interest and display BOLD signal intensity time curves. There is a separate graph for each analysis run.
Spot how well signal intensity curves match the paradigm design. If you move regions of interest, the curves will update in real time. Not happy with the alignment? Access the current processing details right from the BOLD widget to update the parameters and rerun the analysis. The new results will be automatically available in the viewer.
Personalize your view - toggle the visibility of regions of interest and the design graph.
Feature Insight
Motion correction
Subject head motion is one of the most prevalent sources of variance in the fMRI signal and In the worst case, it can render an fMRI dataset entirely useless.
It is always recommended to eliminate motion as far as possible during the scan, but as step in the post-processing, we provide several options to assess and spot head motion across the volume:
Review motion correction graphs, resulting from rigid body motion correction
Use our autoplay feature to scroll through your source data and check for image quality issues
See the QIBA fMRI profile for additional details on how to eliminate motion.
Get a feel of the user interface by checking out the image and video below:
Future Feature
Note that this feature is not in scope of the first release of nordicMEDiVA
Dedicated CVR plugin for breath-hold fMRI
Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) is a useful metric to assess how well the vasculature dilates or constricts in response to various stimuli. CVR is sensitive to various pathological conditions making it a potential biomarker [Giordani et al., 2014; Iranmahboob et al., 2016; Ivankovic et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2021; Petrica et al., 2007; Yazdani et al., 2020]. [1]
In nordicMEDiVA cerebrovascular reactivity analysis can be used together with all BOLD pipelines to asses neurovascular uncoupling.
Book a live demo and see nordicMEDiVA in action!
Perfusion
DSC analysis with fully automatic capabilities
Tumor evaluation
DSC, DCE and diffusion analysis
Pre-surgical planning
fMRI and DTI+Spherical Deconvolution tractography