Spatial smoothing is commonly applied as a pre-processing step in fMRI activation analysis pipelines. We investigate smoothing-matched k-space coverage for multiband EPI, with a particular focus on how varying the sampling speed in a reduced k-space will affect image SNR and resultant activation maps. A block task finger-tapping experiment demonstrates improved SNR from smoothing-matched k-space coverage, and improvements in activation level and specificity in the activation map. Our results demonstrate that dense sampling around the central echo time in multiband EPI produces superior results.
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