High-Resolution 3D-FMRI at 9.4 Tesla with Intrinsically Minimised Geometric Distortions

Rdiger Stirnberg¹, Daniel Pflugfelder¹, Tony Stcker¹, Nadim Jon Shah¹, ²

The application of a 3D-EPI sequence with intrinsically minimised geometric distortions for high-resolution functional imaging (fMRI) is demonstrated in vivo at 9.4 Tesla. In addition to acceleration by means of ramp sampling and parallel imaging, a further increase of the effective imaging bandwidth is achieved by segmentation in the blipped phase encode dimension. The presented results indicate the potential but also the practical limitations (e.g. acceptable temporal resolution) of minimising geometric distortions without employing further post-processing. However, resulting activation patterns, which precisely match the expected locations, prove the feasibility of segmented 3D-EPI for high-resolution fMRI at 9.4 Tesla.