High spatial resolution brain functional MRI using submillimeter balanced steady‐state free precession acquisition^a)

Abstract

It is concluded that the bSSFP sequence is a plausible technique for fMRI investigations at submillimeter voxel widths without compromising fCNR. The reduction of partial volume averaging with nonactivated brain tissues to retain fCNR is uniquely suitable for high spatial resolution applications such as the resolving of columnar organization in the brain.

A brief review of neuroimaging using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

“…1 advantages When compared to other non-invasive functional imaging techniques, the central advantage of fMRI is its high spatial resolution in the millimeter and potentially submillimeter range. 11,12 Its ability to distinguish between smaller regions of activity is superior to positrom emission tomography (PET) and much greater than magnetoencephalography (MEG) or electroencephalography (EEG), which have spatial resolution on the order of centimeters. 13 Although seemingly insignificant, such a difference in resolution is vast considering that a few square millimeters of grey matter may contain millions of neurons, constituting billions of synaptic connections.…”

Double temporal sparsity based accelerated reconstruction of compressively sensed resting-state fMRI

“…Various remedies have been proposed to address high spatio-temporal resolution of fMRI such as development of high magnetic field scanner [4,5,6,7], coil sensitivity improvement inside fMRI scanner [8], advancements in pulse sequences [9,10], usage of parallel imaging [11,12], and compressed sensing (CS) based fMRI reconstruction from fewer k-space (spatial Fourier domain) measurements [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. In this paper, we address the problem of accelerated fMRI reconstruction without the loss of BOLD sensitivity in the CS framework.…”

High spatial resolution compressed sensing (HSPARSE) functional MRI

“…However, achieving high spatial resolution remains a significant challenge in fMRI because it comes at a price of decreased temporal resolution and/or lower contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). Various methods have been developed to address this problem including development of high magnetic field systems (10)(11)(12)(13), improvement of coil sensitivity (14), advancements in pulse sequences (15)(16)(17), usage of parallel imaging (18)(19)(20)(21)(22), and reconstruction with partial k-space (23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28). However, demands for even higher spatial resolution are common, with examples taken from cortical processing models (29,30) and hippocampal pattern separation (31)(32)(33).…”