Abstract #3316

Zoomed Resolution in Simultaneous Multi-Slice EPI for fMRI

David Feinberg¹,², Liyong Chen,²³, An T. Vu⁴

¹Advanced MRI Technologies, Sebastopol, CA, United States; ²Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States; ³Advanced MRI Technologies, LLC, Sebastopol, CA, United States; ⁴CMRR, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States

Recently the simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) EPI technique which reduces the scan time has been combined with in-plane parallel imaging (e.g. GRAPPA) to achieve high spatial resolution at the cost of increased g-factors, phase drift, motion sensitivity and temporal instability. We introduce Zoomed Multi-Band Imaging (ZOMBI) which combines SMS EPI with outer volume suppression (OVS) instead of GRAPPA and compare against SMS EPI with GRAPPA. We find that ZOMBI achieves high isotropic spatial resolution while maintaining faster TR and improving temporal SNR. This obtainable high resolution is immediately useful for vision science research at 3T and 7T.