Through echo-combination, multi-echo echo-planar-imaging (ME-EPI) has shown improved performance for fMRI over single-echo (SE)-EPI. The high-performance gradients on a compact 3T scanner enable whole-brain high-spatial-resolution ME-EPI with reasonable echo times and comparable TR to SE-EPI. To evaluate the fidelity of the ME-EPI sequence in resting state fMRI and compare with that of SE-EPI sequence, seed-based and ICA-based functional connectivity (FC) analyses were applied to evaluate scan-time-dependency and accuracy improvement. ME-EPI extracted more and stronger FCs in seed-based connectivity analysis and produced higher sensitivity and accuracy in ICA-based method, compared to SE-EPI.
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