Feasibility of Detecting Differential Layer Specific Activations in Humans Using SE BOLD FMRI at 7 T

Essa Yacoub¹, Kmil Ugurbil², Cheryl A. Olman¹

Studying layer-dependent neural activity is important because in all species cells, cortical afferents and projection neurons are arranged with reference to different depths in the gray matter. The investigation of layer specific functional activation in humans has been demonstrated at 3 T. Differential layer specific activation has not been demonstrated in any model. High field magnets have proven beneficial for fMRI with respect to spatial specificity and functional sensitivity, offering significant advantages over lower fields. In this work we demonstrate the potential of high field fMRI to observe layer specific activations as well as possible changes in these activations.