Abstract #0633

Single-Shot Whole Brain Echo Volume Imaging for Temporally Resolved Physiological Signals in fMRI

Thomas Witzel^1,2, Jonathan R. Polimeni¹, FaHsuan Lin^1,3, Aapo Nummenmaa¹, Lawrence L. Wald^1,2

¹A. A. Martinos Center MGH Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; ²Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; ³Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

We developed a 64x64x56 matrix, whole-head 3T single-shot EVI sequences for fMRI. We image the whole brain at 8 frames per second and 3.4mm isotropic resolution with the kz phase encoding direction accelerated by a total of 21 fold to reduce distortions in this slow phase encoding direction 21 fold. We analyze the spectral composition of BOLD and physiological signals to show that full Nyquist the cardiac frequency is helpful in mitigating their effect on the estimation of the fMRI activation.