Marco
Pimentel1, Pedro Vilela2, Ins Sousa3,4,
Patricia Figueiredo3
1Faculdade
de Cincias e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal; 2Imaging
Department, Hospital da Luz, Lisbon, Portugal; 3Instituto Superior
Tcnico, Lisbon, Portugal; 4Healthcare Sector, Siemens, S.A.,
Portugal
Previous
studies have shown that ASL-based fMRI exhibits better spatial specificity
than the most commonly used BOLD contrast. Here, we compared the localization
of the hand motor area obtained by simultaneous ASL-BOLD fMRI and standard
BOLD fMRI at 3T with well established anatomical landmarks, in a group of 15
healthy subjects. Our results indicate that the localization of the hand
motor area obtained using ASL fMRI is significantly less variable and closer
to the hand motor cortex anatomical landmarks than the one produced by BOLD
fMRI. This supports the notion that ASL may more accurately localize brain
activation than BOLD.