Abstract #3374

Combining BOLD and CBV for enhanced fMRI CNR

An Thanh Vu^1,2, Alexander JS Beckett^3,4, Jennifer Townsend^3,4, Salvatore Torrisi^3,4, and David Feinberg^3,4

¹Radiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States, ²San Francisco Veteran Affairs Health Care System, San Francisco, CA, United States, ³Advanced MRI Technologies, Sebastopol, CA, United States, ⁴Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States

In this 7T study, we investigate the constructive combination of the BOLD and CBV weighted timeseries of EPI and GRASE based Vascular Space Occupancy (VASO) sequences for enhanced fMRI CNR. Activations from this BOLD+CBV combination resulted in 9% greater t-values as well as, on average, 39% more above-threshold voxels, relative to traditional BOLD. Although this combination method resulted in reduced microvascular specificity for EPI based VASO, for GRASE based VASO, the middle layers were predominantly enhanced, suggesting minimal loss in specificity. Advantageously, this technique does not require re-acquisition of data or modifications to pulse sequence parameters of the VASO sequence.

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