Detection of respiration-induced field modulations in fMRI: A concurrent and navigator-free approach

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is typically acquired using gradient-echo sequences with a long echo time at high temporal resolution. Gradient-echo sequences inherently encode information about the magnetic field in the often discarded image phase. We demonstrate a method for processing the phase of reconstructed fMRI data to isolate temporal fluctuations in the harmonic fields associated with respiration by solving a blind source separation problem. The fMRI-derived field fluctuations are shown to be in strong agreement with breathing belt data acquired during the same scan. This work presents a concurrent, hardware-free measurement of respiration-induced field fluctuations, providing a respiratory regressor for fMRI analysis which is independent of local contrast changes, and with potential applications in image reconstruction and fMRI analysis.