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Abstract #1107

Scan Time Reduction in FMRI Using a 32 Channel Phased Array Receive Coil

Christina Triantafyllou1,2, Sheeba Arnold1, Steven Shannon1, John Gabrieli3, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli3

1A.A. Martinos Imaging Center, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States; 2A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH, Charlestown, MA, United States; 3Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States


Long durations in fMRI are typical, but that is unfeasible for specific populations. Scan-time reduction is possible if one could capitalize on the increased sensitivity afforded by high field strength or multiple channel phased arrays in the high-resolution regime. We evaluated this using a 32-channel coil at 3T with the n-back task on 18 subjects. Compared to 12-channel coil, working memory activation was significantly more (paired t-test) with two-thirds of the 32-channel data. Combination of 32-channel coil and high-resolution could imply lesser sample size, prevent additional data collection and enable studies that would otherwise be impossible due to time restrictions.