Lepping, Rebecca J.Yeh, Hung-WenMcPherson, Brent C.Brucks, Morgan G.Sabati, MohammadKarcher, Rainer T.Brooks, William M.Habiger, Joshua D.Papa, Vlad B.Martin, Laura E.2023-06-122023-06-122023-05-04Lepping RJ, Yeh H-W, McPherson BC, Brucks MG, Sabati M, Karcher RT, Brooks WM, Habiger JD, Papa VB and Martin LE (2023) Quality control in resting-state fMRI: the benefits of visual inspection. Front. Neurosci. 17:1076824. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1076824https://hdl.handle.net/1808/34337Background: A variety of quality control (QC) approaches are employed in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to determine data quality and ultimately inclusion or exclusion of a fMRI data set in group analysis. Reliability of rs-fMRI data can be improved by censoring or “scrubbing” volumes affected by motion. While censoring preserves the integrity of participant-level data, including excessively censored data sets in group analyses may add noise. Quantitative motion-related metrics are frequently reported in the literature; however, qualitative visual inspection can sometimes catch errors or other issues that may be missed by quantitative metrics alone. In this paper, we describe our methods for performing QC of rs-fMRI data using software-generated quantitative and qualitative output and trained visual inspection. Results: The data provided for this QC paper had relatively low motion-censoring, thus quantitative QC resulted in no exclusions. Qualitative checks of the data resulted in limited exclusions due to potential incidental findings and failed pre-processing scripts. Conclusion: Visual inspection in addition to the review of quantitative QC metrics is an important component to ensure high quality and accuracy in rs-fMRI data analysis.© 2023 Lepping, Yeh, McPherson, Brucks, Sabati, Karcher, Brooks, Habiger, Papa and Martin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ArtifactsFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)Resting state—fMRIReproducibility of resultsQuality controlArticle10.3389/fnins.2023.1076824PMC10192849openAccess