Improving the spatial specificity of canonical correlation analysis in fMRI

The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) is often very low in fMRI data, and standard univariate methods suffer from a loss of sensitivity in the context of noise. The increased power of a multivariate statistical analysis method known as canonical correlation analysis (CCA) in fMRI studies with low CNR was established previously. However, CCA in its conventional form has weak spatial specificity. In this work we propose a new assignment scheme to rectify this problem. It is shown that the new method has improved spatial specificity as well as sensitivity compared to conventional CCA for detecting activation patterns in fMRI.