The impact of diverse preprocessing pipelines on brain functional connectivity

Brain functional connectivity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging was shown to be influenced by preprocessing procedures. We aim to describe this influence separately for different preprocessing factors and in 20 different most used preprocessing pipelines. We evaluate the effects of slice-timing correction and physiological noise filtering by RETROICOR, diverse levels of motion correction, and white matter, cerebrospinal fluid, and global signal filtering. With usage of three datasets, we show the impact on global metrics of resting-state functional brain networks and their reliability. We show negative effect of RETROICOR on reliability of metrics and disrupting effect of global signal regression on network topology. We do not support the use of slice-timing correction because it does not significantly influence any of the measured features. We also show that the selected types of preprocessing may affect averaged node strength, normalized clustering coefficient, normalized characteristic path length and modularity.