Yu Li1, Hu Cheng2
1Radiology, Cincinnati
Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States; 2Psychological
& Brain Sciences, Indiana University at Bloomington, Bloomington, IN,
United States
The work presented here introduces a novel approach to visualizing neuronal activity using two contrast mechanisms that arise from the spatial difference of BOLD-induced changes in local B0 field homogeneity and strength. The new contrast is generated by a complex signal calculated from original fMRI signals. This signal, as it characterizes BOLD-associated changes of B0 field variation in image space, is called "field variation signal". In this work, it is demonstrated that fMRI data analysis using field variation signals has the potential to visualize spatial variation of BOLD-associated neuronal activity.