A major component of the Human Connectome Project (HCP) in the WU-Minn consortium is multiband-accelerated whole-brain resting-state functional MRI (rfMRI) at both 3T and 7T. Although providing better contrast and higher spatial resolutions, the 7T acquisition is compromised by RF nonuniformity. Here, we demonstrate the utility of RF parallel transmission (pTx) for 7T HCP-type rfMRI with 1.6-mm isotropic resolutions. Our results show that pTx can significantly enhance temporal SNR across the entire cortical surfaces and in many subcortical voxels relative to a CP-like-mode RF shimming mimicking single-transmit configurations, thereby holding great potential for acquiring high-quality, high-resolution and high-efficiency rfMRI data.
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