Mark Chiew1, 2, Simon J. Graham1, 3
1Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 2Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 3Imaging Research, Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
We present a novel method for fast acquisition of densely-sampled multi-echo fMRI data over a restricted field of view. The DSI (Direct SENSE Imaging) technique employs a modified STEAM localization method for selective excitation of a small number of voxels, and uses direct sensitivity encoding for spatial separation of measured signals. The readout requires no imaging gradients as no Fourier encoding is performed, and the received signals contain both T2 and T2* contrast. This method is proposed as a promising alternative to whole-brain approaches for fast imaging in targeted, ROI-based fMRI.
Keywords