Abstract #0631

Simultaneous pure spin-echo and gradient-echo BOLD fMRI using Echo Planar Time-resolved Imaging (EPTI) for mapping laminar fMRI responses

Fuyixue Wang^1,2, Zijing Dong^1,3, Lawrence L. Wald^1,2, Jonathan Polimeni^1,2, and Kawin Setsompop^4,5

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States, ³Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States, ⁴Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, ⁵Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States

We introduced a novel imaging approach SE-EPTI to address the T2’-contamination in SE-EPI for higher specificity of BOLD fMRI. EPTI resolves multi-contrast distortion/blurring-free images to simultaneously obtain: a pure SE image with minimal T2’-contamination, multiple GE images with various T2’-weightings, and conventional SE-EPI images with different levels of T2’-contamination. We demonstrated at 7T that the pure SE can significantly reduce the draining-vein-effect, and by using shorter ETLs, less T2’-contamination was introduced. A new echo-train-shifting method is also proposed for SE-EPTI to offer flexibility of achieving shorter TEs, allowing us to examine the TE dependence of the signal contribution.

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