fMRI scans with long echo times are vulnerable to signal loss due to through-plane dephasing caused by susceptibility field gradients (SFG), particularly near the air-tissue interface of the sinus regions. Resting state fMRI techniques that sample networks with connectivity through these artifact-plagued regions could be compromised. Several approaches have been proposed for susceptibility compensation, with one promising approach based upon the use of phase-precompensated spectral-spatial RF pulses. These RF pulses pre-phase the magnetization to cancel out the dephasing caused by SFG’s. Here, we evaluated the ability of spectral-spatial pulses to improve detection of resting state fMRI activity.
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