Technology Development for Sub-0.3 Mm Voxel Functional Imaging of the Murine Forepaw Barrel Subfield at 400MHz (9.4T)

Phillip D. Bishop¹, Jason W. Sidabras¹, Andrzej Jesmanowicz¹, Rupeng Li¹, James S. Hyde¹

A 400 MHz (9.4 T) site-specific surface coil was developed to image the rat forepaw barrel subfield at the cortical column level for functional MRI BOLD studies. To pinpoint this activation to a specific cortical column, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) must be appreciably high with a very small voxel size. A low-noise-amplifier was used to overcome losses along the signal path. Images with resolution under 200 micron cubic are now possible. SNR values comparing different voxel sizes are tabulated and compared to the traditional Bruker Surface Coil.