Geon-Ho Jahng1,
Min-Ji Kim2, Eo-Jin Hwang2, Hyug-Gi Kim3,
Kyung-Mi Lee4, Chang-Woo Ryu1, Soo-Yeol Lee3,
Wook Jin1, Dal-Mo Yang1, Ji Seon Park5
1Radiology,
Kyung Hee University Hospital at Gangdong, Kyung Hee University, Seoul,
Korea; 2Radiology, Kyung Hee University Hospital at Gangdong,
Seoul, Korea; 3Biomedical Engineering, Graduate College of
Electronics and Information, Kyung Hee University, Youngin, Gyeonggi-do,
Korea; 4Radiology, Graduate College of of Medicine, Kyung Hee
University, Seoul, Korea; 5Radiology, Kyung Hee University
Hospital, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea
To investigate an fMRI technique with an ultra-short TE (UTE) sequence, the UTE-based fMRI signal was obtained with a three-dimensional UTE sequence in brains of 18 young healthy volunteers during visual stimulations with TE=0.15 ms. The rationales of the use of UTE-based fMRI were to design a novel methodology for fMRI to more directly access cellular activation in addition to much lower sensitivity to field inhomogeneities compared to BOLD. A free induction decay (FID) signal has a potential to detect neuronal events other than T2 or T2* alternations. The UTE-based fMRI may provide a novel mechanism to investigate neuronal activations.