Reproducibility of activation in four motor paradigms. An fMRI study.

Most functional imaging data are collected in single session experiments; little is known about the reproducibility or test-retest reliability of the activation patterns found in these experiments. In our study, 15 healthy volunteers performed four simple motor-paradigms ("Hand", "Foot", "Mouth" and "Tongue") for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 3 sessions on different days. Reproducibility of activations in four anatomical regions (pre- and postcentral gyri, paracentral lobule and the supplementary motor area) was measured in terms of voxels active in all sessions (common voxels) relative to voxels active in single sessions, giving reliability coefficients from 0 to 1.