An T. Vu1,
David A. Feinberg2, 3, Noam Harel1, Kamil
Ugurbil1, Essa S. Yacoub1
1Radiology,
Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
MN, United States; 2Advanced MRI Technologies, Sebastopol, CA,
United States; 3Helen Willis Neuroscience, University of
California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
Single shot 3D GRASE provides T2 weighted images with high isotropic resolutions in a single shot. However it has yet to see wide usage in fMRI in part due to its limitation of imaging only a small field of view. Multi-slab 3D approaches could extend the FOV. However, with inner volume imaging, orthogonally oriented refocussing RF pulses saturate potential neighboring slabs. Here we present a method for multi-slab 3D GRASE inner volume imaging for fMRI which avoids the problem of saturated neighboring slabs and allows imaging of multiple regions of interest without extending TR and without any significant SNR penalties.
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