Advances in artificial intelligence have inspired a paradigm shift in human neuroscience, yielding large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets that provide high-resolution brain responses to thousands of naturalistic visual stimuli. Because such experiments necessarily involve brief stimulus durations and few repetitions of each stimulus, achieving sufficient signal-to-noise ratio can be a major challenge. We address this challenge by introducing GLMsingle , a scalable, user-friendly toolbox available in MATLAB and Python that enables accurate estimation of single-trial fMRI responses ( glmsingle.org ). Requiring only fMRI time-series data and a design matrix as inputs, GLMsingle integrates three techniques for improving the accuracy of trial-wise general linear model (GLM) beta estimates. First, for each voxel, a custom hemodynamic response function (HRF) is identified from a library of candidate functions. Second, cross-validation is used to derive a set of noise regressors from voxels unrelated to the experiment. Third, to improve the stability of beta estimates for closely spaced trials, betas are regularized on a voxel-wise basis using ridge regression. Applying GLMsingle to the Natural Scenes Dataset and BOLD5000, we find that GLMsingle substantially improves the reliability of beta estimates across visually-responsive cortex in all subjects. Comparable improvements in reliability are also observed inmore »
The “Narratives” fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension
Abstract The “Narratives” collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging.
- Authors:
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1912266
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10303996
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Data
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2052-4463
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-01033-3
