You're Invited: Multi-Echo fMRI Users Meeting on Friday, March 14th

[tedana-newsletter]

Dear multi-echo user,

We are excited to invite you to the upcoming Multi-Echo fMRI Users Meeting, scheduled for Friday, March 14th. This meeting promises to be a valuable opportunity for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and discussion within the scientific community.

Meeting Details:

• Date: Friday, March 14th

• Time: 10:00AM EST (other time zones) 

• Duration: 1 hour

• Calendar invite: Add this event to your calendar by opening the attached .ics file. The calendar event will include the Zoom link for easy access.

Agenda:

1. General "tedana" Updates (5 minutes)

   1. Kick off the session with the latest updates on tedana, covering recent developments and key insights.

2. Presentation: "Leveraging external regressors in tedana's decision process" (10 minutes)

   1. Join Neha A. Reddy, Sarah Goodale, and Michelle Medina as they discuss the changes and implementation of the new external regressors feature into tedana’s decision process. This feature allows the user to provide a TSV file with time series (e.g., motion regressors, cardiac and respiratory regressors, etc.) that will be fit to each ICA component, providing more information for tedana and the user to decide which components to accept or reject. While best practices for this new functionality are still a work in progress, tedana community member Michelle Medina will share some initial testing and exploration that evaluates the impact of using external regressors compared to manual classification and tedana’s basic decision tree.

3. Presentation: “Adapting the Tedana Multi-Echo Denoising Pipeline for Echo Planar Time-Resolved Imaging (EPTI)” (10 minutes)

   1. Katie Lamar will shows us how the tedana multi-echo denoising pipeline has not yet been optimized for Echo Planar Time-Resolved Imaging (EPTI), despite its success with EPI. In this talk, we will first discuss the adaptations needed to the Tedana workflow to allow for accurate denoising of EPTI data. We will then discuss how we were able to leveraged the significantly higher number of echoes that EPTI provides over the conventional ME-EPI to allow for the implementation of a more generalized model that no longer assumes that voxel-wise BOLD and non-BOLD signal changes are fully uncoupled.

4. Presentation: “Scripting from fMRIprep to tedana, and validating multi-echo task data” (10 minutes)

   1. Brandon Forys will share how using tedana following fMRIprep preprocessing is convenient for robust denoising but requires careful attention to the stages and order of preprocessing used. Furthermore, when using multi-echo sequences to collect task-based data must be carefully evaluated – not only for standard signal-to-noise ratio metrics but also the presence of expected canonical networks of fMRI activity in each echo. Here, he will briefly present a set of scripts to correctly use fMRIprep inputs in tedana, as well as the results of a recent cross-scanner evaluation (using these scripts) of how acquisition parameters can impact signal and canonical network recovery in task fMRI data.

5. Open Q&A and Discussion on Future Meetings (15 minutes)

   1. We will conclude the session with an open floor for questions, discussions, and planning for future meetings.

We look forward to your participation and contributions to this meeting. Your insights and questions will be invaluable to the community.

See you soon!

The tedana developers team