Human fMRI at 9.4 T: Preliminary Results

Juliane Budde¹, Frank Mhlbauer¹, G. Shajan¹, Maxim Zaitsev², Rolf Pohmann¹

EPI data in humans were acquired at 9.4 T, using a GRE EPI sequence with distortion correction, resulting in 1.1 mm isotropic voxels. A simple finger tapping paradigm was employed for functional testing. In addition, high resolution (0.2 mm x 0.2 mm x 1.1 mm) phase and susceptibility-weighted images were acquired and co-registered to the functional data. Highly significant BOLD response was found in the left motor cortex, mostly located within gray matter, with activation amplitudes up to 20%. Co-registration to susceptibility-weighted data shows strong signal contributions even from vein-free regions.