Impact of TE on Short-TR Pass-B & B-SSFP BOLD Contrast at 3T

Qi Peng^1,2, Yi Zhang^1,2, Oscar San Emeterio Nateras^1,2, Timothy Q. Duong^1,2

Pass-band balanced steady-state free precession (pbSSFP) fMRI offers high BOLD sensitivity and is less susceptible to physiological noise compared to traditional gradient echo planar imaging sequences. However, the contrast mechanism is still under investigation, and the impact of TE on commonly used short-TR (<10ms) pbSSFP on BOLD sensitivity has not been experimentally investigated at 3.0T. In this study, we demonstrated that a TE/TR ratio approaching unity had much higher BOLD compared to the same pbSSFP with TE/TR0.5. Therefore, k-space trajectories leading to larger TE have advantages in short-TR pbSSFP fMRI studies to obtain high BOLD sensitivity.