Compressed Sensing FMRI Using Optimized Temporal Basis

Hong Jung¹, Jong Chul Ye¹

Functional MRI (fMRI) has become popular with the developments of echo planar imaging (EPI) sequences. However, EPI needs more image quality improvements for some applications. For example, EPI images suffer from field inhomogeneity artifacts resulting from signal losses in some areas especially around air-tissue interfaces. These artifacts can be minimized with, for example, thin slice thickness. This strategy, however, requires more acquisition time so that temporal resolution or field of view should be sacrificed. In this paper, to address this problem, we applied a compressed sensing dynamic MR imaging algorithm called k-t FOCUSS to fMRI. To resolve degradation of SNR at accelerated acquisition, more number of repetitions of tasks were conducted. Then, from down-sampled k-space data, we obtained accurate brain activation maps for right finger tapping experiments. We verified the reliability of our results by plotting receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.