Christina Triantafyllou1,2, Boris Keil2,
Sheeba Arnold1, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli1,
1A.A. Martinos Imaging
Center, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States; 2A.A. Martinos Center
for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; 3Harvard-MIT
Division of Health Sciences & Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
Increases in BOLD CNR by improvements in array coils and higher field strength potentially allow sub-structure in connectivity networks to be examined at higher spatial resolutions. In this work we assess the potential of sub-millimeter functional connectivity mapping at 7T by characterizing the effect of voxel size across a range of isotropic resolutions. The results indicate that robust connectivity can be detected at all resolutions including the isotropic 500m data at acquisition time of 5min, on a single subject level; suggesting that fcMRI studies of small-scale networks are only limited by the biological point spread function of the underlying BOLD mechanism.