Abstract #2910

fMRI with a Zero Echo Time (ZTE) Pulse Sequence

Martin John MacKinnon^1,2,3,4, Yuncong Ma^1,2,4, Sheng Song^1,2,4, Tzu-Hao Harry Chao^1,2,4, Tzu-Wen Winnie Wang^1,2,4, SungHo Lee^2,4, SungHo Lee^1,2,4, Wei-Tang Chang^2,5, and Yen-Yu Ian Shih^1,2,4

¹Center for Animal MRI, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ²Biomedical Research Imaging Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ³The Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ⁴Department of Neurology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ⁵Department of Radiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States

Conventional fMRI studies, carried out with the gold-standard echo-planar imaging (EPI), are confounded by the deleterious effects of the sequence’s limitation – its sensitivity to magnetic field inhomogeneities and high acoustic noise. The properties of short acquisition delay sequences, that also have minimal incrementing of gradients during spatial encoding, such as MB-SWIFT and ZTE, render them resistant to the aforementioned confounding factors. We study the feasibility of using ZTE to detect functional activations with endogenous contrast using a simple rat forepaw electrical stimulation paradigm. We show that ZTE-fMRI has a 67% greater sensitivity than the gold-standard BOLD-weighted EPI.

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