One of the major challenges facing resting state fMRI is sleep. Patients falling asleep inside scanners can introduce artifact-inducing motion and affect measured resting state brain activity. Often these negative effects are only seen post-scanning. This can result in unnecessary losses of time and money if re-scanning is necessary, or result in use of inadequate data if re-scanning is not possible. Thus there is a need for a method of alerting MRI technicians during scanning if the patient is asleep or drowsy.
In order to create a method for detecting sleep in fMRI scans, we propose a project consisting of the following sub-tasks: choose one or more physiological parameters that have previously been established to indicate sleep, find or create a method to measure these parameters as a patient is undergoing an fMRI, develop an algorithm that will use the measured data to determine if a patient is asleep, and develop software that will alert the MRI technician if the algorithm detects that a patient is asleep.