Abstract #3722

Improved detection of fMRI activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex using multi-echo EPI

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.

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