Abstract #3715

Quantification of draining vein dominance across cortical depths in BOLD fMRI from first principles using realistic Vascular Anatomical Networks

Joerg P. Pfannmoeller^1,2, Avery J. L. Berman^1,2, Sreekanth Kura³, Xiaojun Cheng³, David A. Boas^1,3, and Jonathan R. Polimeni^1,2,4

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³Neurophotonics Center, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, United States, ⁴Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

The neuronal specificity of gradient echo (GE) BOLD is diminished by the extravascular signal from large draining veins, whose contribution can be reduced by using small voxel sizes and sampling far away from the cortical surfaced. Here we use simulations of the GE-BOLD signal based on a realistic vascular network (VAN) to quantify the extent of the pial vein dominance into the cortex field strengths between 7 and 14 Tesla. We estimate a pial vessel dominance down to a depth of 800 μm at 14 Tesla in humans, suggesting that small GE-BOLD voxels below this depth can be immune to the effects of these surface vessels.

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