Christina Triantafyllou1,2, Mattijs Elschot2,3, Jonathan R. Polimeni2, Lawrence L. Wald2,4
1A.A. Martinos Imaging Center, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; 2A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH, Charlestown, MA, USA; 3Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands; 4Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
Highly parallel detection of functional imaging time-series provides the potential for higher image Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR0) as well as decreased susceptibility distortions in echo-planar imaging. In this study we examine the effect of GRAPPA (R=1,2,3,4) on the time-course SNR (tSNR) at 3T with a 32 channel head coil for a number of image resolutions common to fMRI. Our findings suggest that the acceleration penalty (gR) behaves like other modulators of SNR0 such as field strength, voxel volume, flip angle and coil type.
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