Marta Bianciardi1, 2, Peter van Gelderen1, Jeff H. Duyn1
1Advanced MRI Section, LFMI, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States; 2A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States
Blood fractional oxygen saturation is an indicator of oxygen delivery and metabolism, and may be used to report tissue viability and function. Current methods that estimate the blood fractional oxygen saturation rely on the use of sophisticated fMRI sequences and modeling. We demonstrate the feasibility of estimating the functional change in blood fractional oxygen saturation in large veins during task performance by analyzing the phase signal in gradient-echo fMRI. With activation, fractional oxygen saturation in the sagittal sinus was found to increase by 0.05 which is close to literature estimates.