High Temporal Resolution Functional MRA for Investigating the Neural Activity

Chan-A Park¹, Chang-Ki Kang¹, Seung-Taek Oh¹, Young-Bo Kim¹, Zang-Hee Cho¹

Even though the exact mechanism of the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal is still controversial, it is certainly that the signal change is related to the combination of physiological changes, which include the blood flow/volume change. Until now, with lower sensitivity of blood flow signal, temporal resolution was not enough to compare with fMRI. However, due to high sensitivity for blood flow signal, ultra high field MRI (7T) could provide the opportunity of detecting directly the vascular response by external stimulation. In this paper, we tried to reduce the temporal resolution to 3 sec. for examining the vascular response induced by stimulation, comparable to fMRI.