Noam
Ben-Eliezer1, Ute Goerke2, Michael Garwood2,
Lucio Frydman1
1Chemical Physics, Weizmann Institute
of Science, Rehovot, Israel; 2Center for Magnetic Resonance
Research, Radiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States
The
sensitivity and specificity needed to detect neuronal activation is affected
by the type of fMRI sequence and reconstruction algorithm used. Recent development of a new single-scan
imaging scheme provides an alternative fMRI tool, based on spatial encoding,
which offers higher robustness to B0 field inhomogeneities. A new post-processing procedure was
combined onto this scheme based on super-resolution image reconstruction
algorithms, which improves the ensuing spatial-resolution while reducing the
initially higher hardware requirements and SAR constraints. We analyze the performance afforded by
super-resolution using two novel spatially-encoded based sequences for human
fMRI studies, as compared to standard EPI.