Abstract #2281

Artifact-Suppressed Alternating SSFP fMRI in Human Subjects Using a Breath Hold Paradigm

Tiffany Jou¹, Steve Patterson², John M. Pauly¹, Chris Bowen²

¹Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; ²Institute for Biodiagnostics (Atlantic), National Research Council Canada, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Results from a rat hypercapnia study suggests that by using RF catalyzation to alternate between two RF phase-cycling steady states, whole-brain BOLD activation from a single run of the functional paradigm is possible. This approach has been coined alt-SSFP. Our overall goal was to investigate these possibilities in human studies for the first time. Using human breath holding experiments to perturb BOLD signal, we have shown that alt-SSFP (1) recovers functional sensitivity in regions that suffer signal dropout in GRE-EPI, and (2) exhibits functional sensitivity comparable to the pbSSFP two-acquisition method, but using just a single functional run.