Abstract #2822

Voit D, Frahm J

This work describes the development of a novel technique for fMRI of the human brain at 0.135 l voxel resolution for a whole section. The approach is based on a multi-echo FLASH sequence with unipolar traversals of k-space in the frequency-encoding dimension and echo train shifting to avoid amplitude discontinuities in the phase-encoding dimension. These strategies ensure a smooth point-spread function and eliminate image ghosting artefacts without the need for any post processing. Multi-echo FLASH studies at 300 m in-plane resolution (no interpolation) and 1.5 mm slice thickness revealed robust activations in primary visual areas in response to binocular stimulation.