Simultaneous brain and spinal cord fMRI would be beneficial for studying the nervous system, but is challenging due to the poor B0 homogeneity and small size of the spinal cord. Here, we used dynamic shimming and reduced FOV imaging to address these issues. We obtained improved T2*-weighted images of brain and spinal cord with high clarity. We validated the method for fMRI applications using an fMRI experiment with a fist-clenching task, in which we obtained activation in all regions expected to be involved in the task, including the motor cortices, cerebellum, and C6-C8 spinal cord region.
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