Hing-Chiu Chang1,
Pooja Gaur2, Ying-Hui Chou3, Nan-Kuei Chen1
1Brain
Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States; 2Department
of Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United
States; 3Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University
Medical Center, Durham, NC, United States
The spatial resolution of fMRI data can be significantly improved with segmented EPI acquisition, which is highly susceptible to undesirable aliasing artifacts originating from subtle subject motion, B0 drifting, and other types of signal inconsistencies among multiple EPI segments of each fMRI volume. These aliasing artifacts lead to increased time-domain signal fluctuation in dynamic segmented EPI scans. A novel algorithm, termed multiplexed parallel reconstruction, to effectively remove undesirable aliasing artifacts in segmented EPI based fMRI was reported to produce high-quality, high-resolution and high-SNR fMRI without relying on any external navigator signal.