Christina Triantafyllou1,2, Sheeba Arnold1,
Steven Shannon1, John Gabrieli3, Susan
Whitfield-Gabrieli3
1A.A. Martinos Imaging Center, McGovern
Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States; 2A.A.
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH,
Charlestown, MA, United States; 3Department of Brain and Cognitive
Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States
Long
durations in fMRI are typical, but that is unfeasible for specific
populations. Scan-time reduction is possible if one could capitalize on the
increased sensitivity afforded by high field strength or multiple channel
phased arrays in the high-resolution regime. We evaluated this using a
32-channel coil at 3T with the n-back task on 18 subjects. Compared to
12-channel coil, working memory activation was significantly more (paired
t-test) with two-thirds of the 32-channel data. Combination of 32-channel
coil and high-resolution could imply lesser sample size, prevent additional
data collection and enable studies that would otherwise be impossible due to
time restrictions.