Although the potential of bSSFP for fMRI has been previously demonstrated, the use of bSSFP remains limited at high field due to the presence of banding artefacts. We demonstrate here that a modified bSSFP sequence with alternating phase cycles (0/180°) can provide distortion-free and band-free fMRI images at 7 Tesla with a wide coverage (72 mm), and temporal / spatial resolution that match that of conventional EPI (2 mm isotropic, TRvolume=1.7 s), by combining water-selective spectro-spatial pulses and very high undersampling (12-fold) coupled with controlled aliasing (CAIPIRINHA).
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