Discrimination of volumes with positive and negative functional QSM activation within fMRI-positive volumes in high-resolution, high-field task-based and resting-state data

In this work, we wanted to explore the bidirectional activation in functional Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (fQSM) via Independent Component Analysis (ICA) in various cases, hence we included i) visual paradigm, ii) motor task and iii) resting state experiments with high-resolution data acquired at 7-Tesla. We investigated the behavior in terms of activation patterns and temporal evaluations of functional-PHASE, fQSM and traditional fMRI. Furthermore, we compared regions of activation with phase-contrast-angiography data. In all scenarios, we have found out that the total (positive + negative) activated area in fQSM was well matching with positive activation in fMRI.