Abstract #0009

Evidence Towards Columnar Organization of Human Area MT with Sub-Millimetric, 3D, T2 weighted BOLD fMRI at 7 Tesla

Federico De Martino¹, Jan Zimmermann¹, Gregor Adriany², Pierre-Francois van de Moortele², David A. Feinberg³, Kamil Ugurbil², Rainer Goebel¹, Essa Yacoub²

¹Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands; ²CMRR, Radiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; ³Advanced MRI Technologies, Sebastopol, CA, USA

We provide direct evidence of columnar organization of direction selective features (DSF) in human area MT using spin echo BOLD based fMRI at ultra high fields (7 tesla). We demonstrate that the functional selectivity and sensitivity of high field high resolution SE BOLD fMRI is sufficient to resolve the fine grained organization of feature representations within higher level folded cortical areas.