Abstract #1557

Measuring Task-Modulated Contrasts by Transition-Band BSSFP FMRI: A Rate-Dependence Study of Human Visual Cortical Response

Yi-Lu Tsai¹, Teng-Yi Huang¹

¹Dept. of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan

The functional contrast of Transition-band bSSFP (TB-bSSFP)depends on the complex and nonlinear phase behavior, which is quite different from the BOLD methods. Whether the functional-contrast studies using the BOLD methods and TB-bSSFP can reach the same conclusions is still not investigated. To answer this question, in our study, we designed a visual experiment to compare the stimulus-rate dependency of the functional contrast of both BOLD-EPI and TB-bSSFP. In the result, the TB-bSSFP curve shows highly correlated to the BOLD-EPI curve. Furthermore, the averaged functional contrasts obtained by TB-bSSFP are higher than that obtained by BOLD-EPI.