Direct detection of
neuronal activity through MRI is an active research area. Typical MRI-based
approaches for direct detection of neuronal currents use echo-planar imaging,
which offers wide spatial coverage at low temporal resolution (>100ms). In
this work, we explore a significantly different paradigm, in which we give up
wide spatial coverage, gaining the capability of sampling signals at much
higher rates. Our simulation results indicate that the ability to compare
entire time curves sampled at a high temporal rate leads to an increase in the sensitivity
of detecting neuronal currents by a factor of at least 10.
