Jing Chen1, Jing An2, Yan Zhuo1, X. Joe Zhou3
1State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Inst. of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; 2MR Collaboration NE Asia, Siemens Healthcare, Siemens Shenzhen Magnetic Resonance, Shenzhen, China; 3Department of Radiology and Center for MR Research, University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago, IL, United States
Recently, steady-state free precession (SSFP) fMRI has drawn widespread interests, due to its unique ability of providing distortion-free functional images with improved SNR/CNR, especially in regions near susceptibility boundaries. However, to develop SSFP fMRI as a robust tool for a broad range of applications, several practical issues must be carefully examined. In this study, we measure the hemodynamic response function of transition-band SSFP (tb-SSFP) fMRI, describe its temporal characteristics, and evaluate its linearity.