Brice Fernandez1, Laura Leuchs2, Phillip G. Sämann 2, Michael Czisch2, and Victor I. Spoormaker2
1Applications and Workflow, GE Healthcare, Munich, Germany, 2Neuroimaging Unit, Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany
Standard fMRI suffers from signal loss in the ventromedial and orbital prefrontal
cortex, a region of special interest in affective neuroimaging. Multi-echo EPI
(MEPI) is known to have several advantages over EPI. In this work, we test if
MEPI is able to reach better performance in detecting task-induced activation
in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during fear conditioning, known
for eliciting activity in this area. We demonstrate that MEPI (by means of the
weighted sum combination approach) outperforms standard EPI in vmPFC, which is
highly relevant for affective neuroscience and psychiatry given its critical
role in emotion regulation.
