The 7T Human Connectome Project (HCP) resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) protocol employs slice-accelerated multiband (MB) EPI with a total of 10-fold acceleration (MB 5 and in-plane 2). Such highly accelerated acquisitions provide exquisite temporal resolution at good sensitivity in most cortical regions, but quickly become very SNR starved in transmit field (B1+) deprived regions. This can be mitigated using parallel RF transmission (pTX), which however usually comes at the expense of time-consuming calibrations and pulse computations. This work shows experimentally with HCP-style RS-fMRI scans that a plug-and-play alternative for B1+ mitigation using pTX is possible with multiband Universal Pulses.
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