Abstract #3829

Improving breath-hold cerebrovascular reactivity mapping with multi-echo BOLD fMRI

Stefano Moia¹, Maite Termenon¹, Eneko Uruñuela-Tremiño¹, Rachael C. Stickland², Molly G. Bright^2,3, and César Caballero-Gaudes¹

¹Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, San Sebastián, Spain, ²Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States, ³Biomedical Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States

Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) is an emerging metric for quantifying vascular health. During a BOLD fMRI acquisition, breath-holding is a simple approach for increasing blood CO₂ levels, thereby driving the vasodilatory CVR response. However, breath-holding is associated with increased head motion artifacts, which can confound our estimates of CVR. We demonstrate that multi-echo BOLD fMRI acquisitions, in conjunction with denoising with multi-echo independent component analysis approaches, enable better differentiation of true vasodilatory responses and improve the reliability of CVR estimates across multiple sessions in highly sampled individuals.

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