High spatial resolution is essential for blood oxygenation level dependent fMRI of laminar or columnar structures and a voxel size of 0.5 mm would be desirable. With common 2D EPI acquisitions this leads to prohibitively long readout trains, echo times and high in-plane distortions. We therefore propose a 3D POP EPI with minimal in-plane distortion and an echo time dependent on the number of slices that can achieve 0.5 mm isotropic resolution. We further investigate analysis methods based on classical and Bayesian statistical inference for this high-resolution data and show the gained sensitivity when using the Bayesian inference scheme.
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