Effect of a Prescan Patient-Radiologist Encounter on Functional MR Image Quality

American Journal of Neuroradiology

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Fig 1.
Sample figures from the patient-physician encounter handbook demonstrating examples of fMRI image degradation due to excessive movement (left) and insufficient attention (right).
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Fig 2.
Bar graph showing the percentage distribution of noise scores by quartile, by using all sequences obtained irrespective of individual patient or study information, without (black bars) and with (white bars) a prescan physician-patient interview.
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Fig 3.
Same as Fig 2, except comparing groups on the basis of the average of all sequences obtained for a given patient's entire study. Again shown is the percentage distribution of studies both without (black bars) and with (white bars) the intervention of a prescan physician-patient interview.

Table 2:

Comparison of fMRI scan quality between groups without a prescan interview and those with a prescan interview

Variable	No Prescan Interview		With Prescan Interview		P Value
Variable	Patients (n = 96)	Scans (n = 460)	Patients (n = 106)	Scans (n = 539)	P Value
Unacceptable sequences	–	15.2% (70/460)	–	10.9% (59/539)	.04
Unacceptable studies	9.4% (9/96)	–	1.9% (2/106)	–	.02
Fraction of outlying data points during time course	–	0.65%	–	0.59%	.004
SD of linear displacements of image centroid (range, voxels)	–	0.008	–	0.007	<.01
		0.022		0.019	<.01
		0.012		0.010	<.01
SD of angular displacements of image centroid (range)	–	0.17°	–	0.10°	<.001
		0.19°		0.12°	<.001
		0.21°		0.10°	<.001

Note:—This analysis was conducted grouping the data on the scan/sequence basis and the patient basis. The extra numbers seen on the scan-basis analysis could not be meaningfully extended into the patient basis and therefore hyphens are used.