Abstract #2835

Zhao Q, White K, Crosson B, McGregor K, Conway T

Functional MRI is one of the most demanding imaging applications. It uses blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast to map task-related human brain activation. Test-retest reliability of such mappings has been studied using different paradigms and analysis strategies. Many factors, such as within- and between-subject sources of variance, can compromise repeatability. SmartPhantom, a device which provides repeatable and reproducible simulated BOLD activations by radio-frequency coils and a remote-controlled computer, eliminates such variances from the reliability test. Multiple sessions of SmartPhantom data were acquired from a 3T scanner, and the reliability was analyzed using mutual information based divergence measurements.