Anatomically constrained volumetric smoothing enhances fMRI reliability while avoiding smoothing artifacts
Michele R. Aizenberg
IntroductionSmoothing fMRI data prior to analysis is a fundamental and widely used technique to increase sensitivity. Unconstrained smoothing can also reduce the spatial specificity of the analysis by introducing artifacts in the data. This study tested the effects of smoothing on the reliability and accuracy of both task fMRI and resting state data. The effects of unconstrained smoothing were compared to those of an anatomically constrained smoothing method, which prevents smoothing across the