Abstract #3728

Multiband integrated-SSFP for functional imaging at 7T with reduced susceptibility artifacts

Kaibao Sun^1,2, Zhentao Zuo¹, Hanyu Shao¹, Zhongwei Chen^1,2, Bo Wang¹, Thomas Martin³, Yi Wang³, Peng Zhang¹, Rong Xue¹, and Danny JJ Wang³

¹State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Beijing MRI Center for Brain Research, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, People's Republic of, ²Graduate School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, People's Republic of, ³Laboratory of FMRI Technology (LOFT), Department of Neurology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States

BOLD fMRI based on echo-planar imaging (EPI) suffers from susceptibility artifacts that impair imaging in specific brain regions, especially severe at ultrahigh fields. Integrated-SSFP (iSSFP), which is modified from balanced SSFP (bSSFP), shows constant magnitude regardless of frequency shift and is proposed to overcome the obstacle. In our 1st experiment, iSSFP achieved better image quality without banding artifacts and more stable signal changes in visual cortex than bSSFP. In our 2nd experiment, using semantic processing task, more tissue signal and greater activations in the inferior portion of the anterior temporal lobe were detected by multiband iSSFP compared to EPI fMRI.

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