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BOLD fMRI at 9.4T with 3D stack-of-spirals readouts
Alejandro Monreal-Madrigal1, Denizhan Kurban2, Desmond H Y Tse3
1Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands. alejandromonreal93@outlook.com.
Objective:
To investigate the use of spiral readouts for sub-millimeter BOLD fMRI at 9.4T and to verify simulations of the BOLD point spread function (PSF) with functional experiments.
Materials And Methods:
Spiral readouts were evaluated through simulations and functional experiments to test their performance in sub-millimeter BOLD fMRI. Both spiral-out and spiral-in readout strategies were considered, with attention to echo time (TE) relative to T2*.
Results:
We confirmed that a TE shorter than T2* can be employed for spiral-out readouts without compromising BOLD sensitivity. The use of shorter TE provided a reduced repetition time (TR), improved temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR), and minimized off-resonance effects.
Discussion:
Spiral-in readouts were found to be mainly useful for lower-resolution applications at ultra-high field (UHF). In contrast, segmented spiral-out readouts demonstrated strong potential for mesoscopic BOLD fMRI at ultra-high fields (> 7T).
