Increasing temporal resolution in hybrid 3D EPI fMRI studies using unfold

Author

Afacan, Onur ; Hoge, Scott ; Brooks, Dana H. ; Mórocz, István Á

fYear

2009

fDate

June 28 2009-July 1 2009

Firstpage

654

Lastpage

657

Abstract

In this work, we apply the UNFOLD technique to a hybrid 3D-EPI sequence in order to accelerate image acquisition for fMRI studies. UNFOLD is used in the 3D slice encoding direction which directly doubles the temporal resolution. Combining UNFOLD with Partial Fourier acqusition further reduces the acquisition time for a whole brain volume from 2.4 seconds to 1 seconds. The sequence was tested on healthy volunteers who were exposed to an audio-visual stimulus paradigm involving the solution of arithmetic problems. The temporal decoding of neural activity using the BOLD contrast mechanism improved significantly at the cost of a slight loss in SNR.

Keywords

Fourier analysis; biomedical MRI; image coding; image resolution; image sequences; medical image processing; 3D slice encoding; BOLD contrast mechanism; audio-visual stimulus paradigm; brain; hybrid 3D EPI fMRI; hybrid 3D-EPI sequence; image acquisition; image sequence; neural activity; partial Fourier acqusition; temporal resolution; time 2.4 s to 1 s; Biomedical imaging; Encoding; Frequency; Image analysis; Image resolution; Magnetic resonance imaging; Radiology; Recruitment; Spatial resolution; Testing; Magnetic resonance imaging; UNFOLD; fMRI analysis; functional MRI; partial Fourier;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, 2009. ISBI '09. IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Boston, MA

ISSN

1945-7928

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-3931-7

Electronic_ISBN

1945-7928

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISBI.2009.5193132

Filename

5193132