Abstract #2048

Brain FMRI with Dual Echo Steady-State (DESS) Imaging: Preliminary Findings on Signal Behavior and Flip-Angle Dependency

Pei-Hsin Wu¹, Hsiao-Wen Chung¹,², Ming-Long Wu³,⁴, Tzu-Chao Chuang⁵, Tzu-Cheng Chao³,⁴

¹Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ²Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ³Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan; ⁴Institute of Medical Informatics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan; ⁵Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Previous study demonstrates that optimization of image contrast for morphological depiction using DESS imaging. The sensitivity of DESS signals to functional brain activations, however, has not been explored. In this study, we report the preliminary results from phantom and human experiments to investigate the relationship between functional contrast and the imaging parameters for S+ and S- images, respectively.