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Abstract #1465

Fat-suppressed Alternating-SSFP for Whole-Brain fMRI Using a Short Spatial-Spectral Pulse

Tiffany Jou 1 , Steve Patterson 2 , John M. Pauly 1 , and Chris Bowen 2

1 Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, 2 Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Alternating-SSFP (alt-SSFP) suppresses banding artifacts and allows for whole-brain fMRI in a single run by using RF catalyzation to alternate between RF phase-cycling steady states. However, bright fat signal remains a problem because of the short TR used. Without an effective fat suppression technique, artifacts like fat chemical shift and off-resonance signal instability result. Our goal was to design a spectral-spatial (SPSP) pulse short enough to be used for alt-SSFP fMRI, with reduced fat chemical shift artifacts and improved temporal SNR (tSNR) time-courses. In this study, we propose our SPSP fat-suppression method as the first practical implementation of alt-SSFP and demonstrate good BOLD sensitivity in both breath-hold and visual paradigms.

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