Venkata Veerendranadh Chebrolu1, Brice Fernandez2, Suresh E Joel1, Bharath Sundar1, Luca Marinelli3, Rakesh Mullick1, Victor I Spoormaker4, Michael Czisch4, and Thomas K Foo3
1GE Global Research, Bangalore, India, 2GE Healthcare, Munich, Germany, 3GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY, United States, 4Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany
In
this work we compare whole brain functional connectivity (FC) estimates from
R2* resting-sate fMRI (rs-fMRI) with BOLD rs-fMRI. Thirty-two healthy subjects
were imaged using three-echo multi-echo echo-planar-imaging (MEPI) under
institutional guidelines. FC matrices based on structural and functional brain
parcellation schemes were computed for individual BOLD echoes, R2* and M
(initial magnetization approximated by BOLD signal at TE=0). Results tend to
show that M might be helpful to decouple flow effects. Positive between network
connectivity was observed in BOLD, M and R2* derived matrices. Anti-correlations
observed between networks in BOLD and M were significantly lesser in R2*
derived matrices.
