Onur Afacan1,2, Dana Brooks2,
Scott Hoge1, Istvan A. Morocz1
1Dept. of Radiology, Harvard Medical
School & Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 2ECE
Dept., Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States
Cognitive
imaging desires both whole brain coverage, relatively high spatial
resolution, and high temporal resolution. In an effort to achieve these goals
with multi-shot 3D-EPI, we implemented: i) UNFOLD (in the slice encoding
direction) and ii) Parallel imaging (in both the 3D slice and phase encoding
directions). We decreased the volume TR from 3s to 0.82s. We demonstrate the
results on healthy volunteer subjects using two different fMRI paradigms: a)
event related complex cognitive stimuli where the events lasted for a time
period of up to twenty TRs and b) a simple visuospatial-motor task in a
random-length block design.