3D GRASE is used for cortical layer and columnar fMRI in the absence of signal confounds from draining veins. Its use has been limited by limited slice coverage with blurring. We developed highly accelerated 3D GRASE with controlled T2 blurring by combining compressed sensing with variable flip angles. Compared with current GRASE acquisitions, the proposed method demonstrates that 1) through-plane random encoding with VFA increases the slice coverage with a sharper point spread function, 2) reduced TE from in--plane random encoding provides a high SNR efficiency, and 3) the resulting image sharpness and SNR efficiency lead to increased BOLD activation.
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