Preparing fMRI Data for Statistical Analysis

This chapter describes the procedures applied to fMRI data prior to their statistical analysis. This usually begins with converting the data from original MR format to a form that can be used by the analysis software. The data are then motion corrected. If an anatomical scan is collected for the subject, then it would be co-registered with the fMRI, and may serve to estimate the warps needed to spatially normalise the fMRI to some standard space. The final pre-processing step is usually to smooth the data.