A multiband multi-echo simultaneous ASL/BOLD sequence was developed and utilized to evaluate resting state connectivity. ASL sequences have inherently long TRs due to the tagging and delay components. To compensate for this, four echoes were collected allowing multi-echo independent component analysis (ME-ICA) to be employed to denoise the BOLD data. A seed-based analysis was used for the computation of functional connectivity. Temporal signal to noise ratio (tSNR) was significantly higher for the denoised data resulting in an increase in connectivity strength, cluster size, and number of clusters. The sequence also allowed perfusion-weighted connectivity to be computed.
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