Abstract #0664

Miller K, Wiggins C, Jezzard P, Wiggins G, Smith S

Balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) has recently been demonstrated to detect brain activity, with the potential to decouple functional contrast from sources of image artifacts. However, the dynamics of this functional contrast have yet to be explored, as have the noise properties of SSFP FMRI. This work experimentally characterizes SSFP FMRI signal via comparison with GRE over two TR and three field strengths. Our results indicate that SSFP has both higher contrast and higher noise than matched GRE sequences, indicating a fundamentally different source of contrast than conventional BOLD>