Distortion correction is an essential step for anatomically faithful analysis of ultra-high-field fMRI data due to strong susceptibility-induced geometric distortions in echo-planar imaging (EPI). Although the point-spread-function (PSF) method allows accurate unwarping and increase in SNR, its effectiveness in modulating the undistorted BOLD signal is still unknown. In this study we applied the PSF-based distortion correction using different types of correction kernels to GRE- and SE-EPI data at different resolutions and directly to the BOLD contrast maps, and evaluated the effectiveness by assessing functional contrast, specificity, and false-positive-rate.
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