Abstract #3339

Measurements of Cerebral Blood Volume and BOLD Signal During Hypercapnia and Functional Stimulation in Humans at 7T: Application to Calibrated BOLD

Laurentius Huber¹, Dimo Ivanov²,³, Steffen N. Krieger², Claudine Jolle Gauthier², Elisabeth Roggenhofer⁴, Ilona Henseler⁴, Robert Turner², Harald E. Moeller¹

¹NMR-Unit, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; ²Neurophysics, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; ³Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands; ⁴Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

VAscular Space Occupancy (VASO) is the most widely used method to investigate human functional cerebral blood volume (CBV) changes. These measurements are limited at high field strengths by low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or inflow effects. A high-SNR VASO variant is introduced that can avoid inflow effects of fresh blood by using a newly-designed partial inversion pulse at 7T. The high SNR of the developed method was utilized to obtain voxel-wise estimates of the calibration factor M and CMRO2 changes on a single-subject basis.