Joo P. F. Jorge1,2, Patrcia Figueiredo1,2,
Wietske van Der Zwaag3,4, Mayur Narsude3, Jos P.
Marques3,4
1Instituto Superior
Tcnico, Lisbon, Portugal; 2Institute for Systems & Robotics,
Lisbon, Portugal; 3Laboratory for Functional & Metabolic
Imaging, cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; 4Department
of Radiology, Universit de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Recently, there has been an increased interest in segmented EVI acquisitions in fMRI studies due to their improved image SNR compared to traditional EPI. However, the segmented EVI is more susceptible to noise arising from temporally-correlated, signal-dependent noise sources. In this work, the ability of regressors based on simultaneously acquired physiological signals to explain the signal variance of fMRI data acquired with these two sequences was evaluated. The use of a physiological signal-based correction method improved the temporal SNR and BOLD sensitivity of the segmented EVI data to levels superior to those of conventional EPI.
Keywords