What Is the Optimum FMRI Procedure with Auditory Stimulation?

Karsten Mueller¹, Toralf Mildner¹, Tom Fritz¹, Joeran Lepsien¹, Christian Schwarzbauer², Harald E. Mller¹

To present auditory stimuli in the absence of scanner noise, the sparse temporal sampling (STS) approach was introduced. The interleaved-silent steady-state (ISSS) technique is combining the idea of splitting image acquisition and stimulus presentation with a better sampling of the fMRI signal. We performed an auditory experiment with pleasant and unpleasant stimuli using four fMRI sessions: STS, ISSS, and simultaneous stimulus presentation and image acquisition with axial and sagittal scanning. The total acquisition time was the same in all four sessions. The best sensitivity for detecting activations of sub-cortical regions (such as the amygdala) was found for ISSS.