REST: A Toolkit for Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data Processing

TLDR

Resting‑state fMRI has attracted growing interest, yet no publicly available, systematically integrated, user‑friendly processing tool exists. The authors created REST, a toolkit for analyzing resting‑state fMRI data. REST, implemented in MATLAB with a GUI, accepts preprocessed data from SPM or AFNI and provides functional connectivity, regional homogeneity, ALFF, fractional ALFF, plus utilities such as DICOM sorting, trend removal, band‑pass filtering, time‑course extraction, covariate regression, image calculation, statistical analysis, and a slice viewer. REST is open‑source and freely available at http://www.restfmri.net.

Abstract

Resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has been drawing more and more attention in recent years. However, a publicly available, systematically integrated and easy-to-use tool for RS-fMRI data processing is still lacking. We developed a toolkit for the analysis of RS-fMRI data, namely the RESting-state fMRI data analysis Toolkit (REST). REST was developed in MATLAB with graphical user interface (GUI). After data preprocessing with SPM or AFNI, a few analytic methods can be performed in REST, including functional connectivity analysis based on linear correlation, regional homogeneity, amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF), and fractional ALFF. A few additional functions were implemented in REST, including a DICOM sorter, linear trend removal, bandpass filtering, time course extraction, regression of covariates, image calculator, statistical analysis, and slice viewer (for result visualization, multiple comparison correction, etc.). REST is an open-source package and is freely available at http://www.restfmri.net.