Recently, an echo-planar imaging approach has
been presented that covers the human brain and cervical spinal cord in the same
acquisition in order to investigate the functional connectivity of the two
regions. However, the repetition time of this approach (TR) usually exceeds 3 s which
is not optimal for a connectivity analysis. Multi-band acceleration is a
promising technique to speed up acquisitions, but most neck coil geometries
limit its applicability for the cervical spinal cord. In this study, multi-band
acceleration is applied to the brain slices only yielding a significantly
reduced TR while retaining a good image quality in the cervical spinal cord.
