Abstract #5188

Reliable Measurement of Cortico-subcortical Functional Connectivity of Human Brain with 7T MRI

Nathan CROSS¹, Jinhan Chen², He Wang^2,3, Sharon Naismith¹, Fernando Calamante⁴, Zhensen Chen^2,3,5, and Jinglei Lv^4,5

¹School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia, ²Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, ³MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience and Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, ⁴School of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia, ⁵Joint Last Author, Sydney, Australia

Synopsis

Keywords: fMRI Analysis, Brain Connectivity

Motivation: Studying cortico-subcortical circuits with fMRI is attracting increasing attention, but the reliability of functional connectivity (FC) is often compromised, limiting interpretation.

Goal(s): To develop novel multi-echo fMRI sequences to measure reliable BOLD activity for both cortical and subcortical brain regions, by which better SNR can be guaranteed and reliable functional connectivity can be measured.

Approach: Participants were measured across 4 sessions. Three sequence-processing combinations were compared for their signal-to-noise ratio and FC stability: 1) single-echo fMRI, 2) multi-echo fMRI, 3) multi-echo ICA.

Results: Multi-echo fMRI showed a significant improvement in overall signal quality and FC reliability between the subcortical regions and the neocortex.

Impact: This multi-echo fMRI sequence demonstrates a significant boost in signal quality from subcortical regions that suffer from degradation in single-echo sequences. This robustly increases reliability of FC estimates when investigating the roles of subcortex in cognition and disease (e.g. neurodegeneration).

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