Dear Sir,

Thanks for your reply. 
Before I come forward with my doubt, I'd like to share the step which I used for detecting bad volumes.
In this experiment, no. of voumes used=108.
Steps...
> open artrepair
> open bad volumes: detect and rep...
> which global mean to use? Every voxel
> selected the 108 volumes
> selected the rp_..txt

Then the software gives the above fig.

Am I right with the steps?

If yes, What should be the min. number of affected volumes for an fmri analysis?
Is there any formula to detect it?

Otherwise, in my case, if the number of affected volumes is less than 5, shall i use the data for further analysis?
I have seen a repair option which will despike the data and give us new volumes with prefix 'v'. Can I  preprocess the data again and include for further analysis?


On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 9:03 PM, Helmut Nebl <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
When it comes to head motion most of the standard fMRI papers refer to overall motion/displacement, measured from the first to the last volume. The criterion is typically ~3 - 5 mm or in other words, motion within the size of a voxel. Unfortunately this doesn't tell us much about data quality, as subjects might constantly be shaking their heads/shivering, which often results in rather drastic artefacts. This is probably more problematic than the overall motion (which is going to affect the data quality to some extent as well of course, reduced SNR, losing voxels from analysis if subjects moved out of plane, geometric deformations due to inhomogenous magnetic field).

Artrepair plots estimated motion between successive volumes ("fast motion", scan-to-scan motion). The default criterion is 0.5 mm/TR. Similar thresholds or even more conservative ones like 0.3 mm/TR have frequently been employed in the context of resting state fMRI for the last couple of years. So in your case, as the run is short and the number of affected volumes large, the run might have to be rejected. There are different opionions on how to treat data sets like that, some of them try to replace the "bad" volumes with a mean or some interpolated data, others add regressors to the design matrix, others discard these subjects entirely. In any case you should check whether motion is related to some other variable, as you might introduce some bias (for example larger head motion in patients).