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Abstract #2281

Artifact-Suppressed Alternating SSFP fMRI in Human Subjects Using a Breath Hold Paradigm

Tiffany Jou1, Steve Patterson2, John M. Pauly1, Chris Bowen2

1Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 2Institute for Biodiagnostics (Atlantic), National Research Council Canada, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Results from a rat hypercapnia study suggests that by using RF catalyzation to alternate between two RF phase-cycling steady states, whole-brain BOLD activation from a single run of the functional paradigm is possible. This approach has been coined alt-SSFP. Our overall goal was to investigate these possibilities in human studies for the first time. Using human breath holding experiments to perturb BOLD signal, we have shown that alt-SSFP (1) recovers functional sensitivity in regions that suffer signal dropout in GRE-EPI, and (2) exhibits functional sensitivity comparable to the pbSSFP two-acquisition method, but using just a single functional run.

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Keywords

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