Abstract #1229

Cortical-depth dependence of pure T2-weighted BOLD fMRI with minimal T2’ contamination using Echo-Planar Time-resolved Imaging (EPTI)

Fuyixue Wang^1,2, Zijing Dong^1,3, Qiyuan Tian¹, Jingyuan Chen¹, Anna Izabella Blazejewska¹, Timothy G. Reese¹, Jonathan R. Polimeni^1,2, and Kawin Setsompop^1,2

¹A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States, ³3Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States

BOLD fMRI based on T₂ contrast has the promise to provide exclusively microvascular specificity, which would optimize the ability of fMRI signals to accurately reflect and localize neuronal activity. However, it is challenging in practice to achieve pure T₂ weighting. Here we employ a new highly-efficient acquisition and reconstruction framework based on EPI, Echo-Planar Time-resolved Imaging (EPTI), and extend it to generate blurring- and distortion-free data with purely T₂ weighting. We evaluate the technique through a cortical-depth analysis of activation in human visual cortex and demonstrate that it achieves the desired microvascular specificity.

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