Abstract #3297

Dumoulin S, Wandell B, Lee J, Gurney P, Nishimura D, Pauly J, Shankaranarayanan A

A new fMRI method, which we refer to as BOX (Blood OXygenation), generates oxygenation level dependent contrast using the T2 sensitive steady state of SSFP imaging. BOX has large coverage over the off-resonance frequency range because SSFP imaging is sensitive to T2 changes over a broad range of off-resonance frequencies. However, there are still areas of no signal referred to as banding. Such banding can be easily removed with two acquisitions. By using two acquisitions, distortion-free high spatio-temporal resolution 3D full-brain coverage can be obtained.