Head motion in children with ADHD during resting-state brain imaging

Although head motion during scanning has been largely considered to reflect simply technical artifacts, there is growing evidence showing that the variable of head motion reflects valuable information regarding individual’s psychological and/or clinical factors. Detailed studies would not only help to deal with the head motion biases, but they also help researchers in understanding the mental disorders. In this study, children with ADHD and demographically-matched typically developing control (TDC) participants underwent rs-fMRI examination without any specific task, and six mean single head motion parameters (three translational and three rotational) and a summary motion index for each participant were obtained. We found that patients with ADHD showed specific patterns of head motion during scanning: motion was significantly increased in the ADHD group, which was mainly contributed by the motion around and along the superior-to-inferior direction. Furthermore, the cross-validation classification analyses showed that the head motion could accurately distinguish children with ADHD from the healthy controls. These results suggest that head motion during scanning reflects useful information about the participants and accounting for head motion from MRI data may be helpful for ADHD diagnosing and treatment with neuroimaging.