Global Diffeomorphic Phase Alignment of Time-Series from Resting-State fMRI Data

David S. Lee, Ashish Sahib, Katherine L. Narr, Elvis Nunez, Shantanu H. Joshi

Abstract: We present a novel method for global diffeomorphic phase alignment of time-series data from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) signals. Additionally, we propose a multidimensional, continuous, invariant functional representation of brain time-series data and solve a general global cost function that brings both the temporal rotations and phase reparameterizations in alignment. We define a family of cost functions for spatiotemporal warping and compare time-series warps across them. This method achieves direct alignment of time-series, allows population analysis by aligning time-series activity across subjects and shows improved global correlation maps, as well as z-scores from independent component analysis (ICA), while showing new information exploited by phase alignment that was not previously recoverable.