This book discusses the modeling and analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data acquired from the human brain. The data processing pipelines described rely on R. The book is intended for readers from two communities: Statisticians who are interested in neuroimaging and looking for an introduction to the acquired data and typical scientific problems in the field; and neuroimaging students wanting to learn about the statistical modeling and analysis of MRI data. Offering a practical introduction to the field, the book focuses on those problems in data analysis for which implementations within R are available. It also includes fully worked examples and as such serves as a tutorial on MRI analysis with R, from which the readers can derive their own data processing scripts. The book starts with a short introduction to MRI and then examines the process of reading and writing common neuroimaging data formats to and from the R session. The main chapters cover three common MR imaging modalities and their data modeling and analysis problems: functional MRI, diffusion MRI, and Multi-Parameter Mapping. The book concludes with extended appendices providing details of the non-parametric statistics used and the resources for R and MRI data.The book also addresses the issues of reproducibility and topics like data organization and description, as well as open data and open science. It relies solely on a dynamic report generation with knitr and uses neuroimaging data publicly available in data repositories. The PDF was created executing the R code in the chunks and then running LaTeX, which means that almost all figures, numbers, and results were generated while producing the PDF from the sources.

This book discusses modelling and analysis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data of the human brain. For the data processing pipelines we rely on R, the software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The book is intended for readers from two communities: Statisticians, who are interested in neuroimaging and look for an introduction to the acquired data and typical scientific problems in the field and neuroimaging students, who want to learn about the statistical modeling and analysis of MRI data. Being a practical introduction, the book focuses on those problems in data analysis for which implementations within R are available. By providing full worked-out examples the book thus serves as a tutorial for MRI analysis with R, from which the reader can derive its own data processing scripts. The book starts with a short introduction into MRI. The next chapter considers the process of reading and writing common neuroimaging data formats to and from the R session. The main chapters then cover four common MR imaging modalities and their data modeling and analysis problems: functional MRI, diffusion MRI, Multi-Parameter Mapping and Inversion Recovery MRI. The book concludes with extended Appendices on details of the utilize non-parametric statistics and on resources for R and MRI data. The book also addresses the issues of reproducibility and topics like data organization and description, open data and open science. It completely relies on a dynamic report generation with knitr: The books R-code and intermediate results are available for reproducibility of the examples.

Noise is a common issue for all Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques and obviously leads to variability of the estimates in any model describing the data. A number of special MR sequences as well as increasing spatial resolution in MR experiments further diminish the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, with low SNR the expected signal deviates from its theoretical value. Common modeling approaches therefore lead to a bias in estimated model parameters. Adjustments require an analysis of the data generating process and a characterization of the resulting distribution of the imaging data. We provide an adequate quasi-likelihood approach that employs these characteristics. We elaborate on the effects of typical data preprocessing and analyze the bias effects related to low SNR for the example of the diffusion tensor model in diffusion MRI. We then demonstrate that the problem is relevant even for data from the Human Connectome Project, one of the highest quality diffusion MRI data available so far.

Attempts for in-vivo histology require a high spatial resolution that comes with the price of a decreased signal-to-noise ratio. We present a novel iterative and multi-scale smoothing method for quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data that yield proton density, apparent transverse and longitudinal relaxation, and magnetization transfer maps. The method is based on the propagation-separation approach. The adaptivity of the procedure avoids the inherent bias from blurring subtle features in the calculated maps that is common for non-adaptive smoothing approaches. The characteristics of the methods were evaluated on a high-resolution data set (500 mym isotropic) from a single subject and quantified on data from a multi-subject study. The results show that the adaptive method is able to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in the calculated quantitative maps while largely avoiding the bias that is otherwise introduced by spatially blurring values across tissue borders. As a consequence, it preserves the intensity contrast between white and gray matter and the thin cortical ribbon.