Abstract #3707

Short TR Resting State Data Acquired with a Simultaneous Multislice Multi-Echo Sequence at 7T, a Comparison with Multi-Echo

Rasim Boyacioglu¹, Jennifer Bersch¹, Benedikt A. Poser², Peter J. Koopmans¹,³, Markus Barth¹,³, David Norris¹,³

¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands; ²John A. Burns School of Medicine, U. of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, United States; ³Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, University Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging enables 2D sequences to be accelerated in the slice direction. We have implemented a short TR SMS multi-echo (ME) sequence to investigate the potential improvement in sensitivity compared to ME at 7T for resting state (RS) fMRI. We also explored different echo weighting schemes (TE vs. Average) as RS BOLD signal characteristics might impose different constraints than previously shown task fMRI results. We found that SMS acquisition improves sensitivity compared to a standard ME sequence and combining echoes by averaging might be more favourable than TE weighting at 7T for RS fMRI data.