The use of the harmonic median for fMRI signal intensity characterization

The problem of detecting significant brain activity upon stimulus in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data is tackled by a statistical data analysis for which the signal's amplitude is required. From literature, it is known that fMRI data follow a Rice distribution. Hence, for fMRI signal detection first the parameters of the Rice distribution need to be estimated. Different methods exist and each has their own pros and cons. In this paper, a novel estimation approach is presented in order to overcome the drawbacks of the existing methods. The proposed estimator is based on the harmonic median. Its performance is verified via a simulation experiment and compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.