Patrick P. Gao1,
2, Russell W. Chan1, 2, Joe S. Cheng1,
2, Iris Y. Zhou1, 2, Ed X. Wu1, 2
1Laboratory
of Biomedical Imaging and Signal Processing, The University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China; 2Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
SAR, China
Resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) has been increasingly used to study brain function on humans and animals. Currently, most rsfMRI studies adopt the GE-EPI sequence which has a blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast. However, GE-EPI is affected by signal dropout and image distortion due to nature of GE and long echo time. These problems become more severe at high field and in regions close to air-tissue interface. Balanced steady-state free procession (bSSFP) imaging is free from these problems. Recently it has been demonstrated to detect BOLD-like activation signals for fMRI. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using bSSFP to detect resting-state networks.