Pooja Gaur1,
Helen Egger1, Nan-kuei Chen2
1Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States; 2Brain
Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States
EPI
based fMRI has several major limitations: distortion, low spatial-resolution,
and low anatomic resolvability. Therefore, it is not easy to register fMRI
data to structural images, and to normalize fMRI data. EPI distortion
correction and nonlinear normalization methods have been developed to address
these limitations. However, it is not easy to assess how these methods perform
on fMRI data with distortions, limited resolution, and anatomic
resolvability. Here we report an imaging protocol based on high-resolution
inversion-recovery prepared segmented EPI (with identical distortion patterns
as in single-shot EPI), enabling accurate assessment of the performance for
distortion correction and nonlinear normalization algorithm.