Impact of prospective motion correction, distortion correction methods and large vein bias on the spatial accuracy of cortical laminar fMRI at 9.4 Tesla

NeuroImage

Myung-Ho In¹  Johannes Stelzer²  Pablo Kraemer-Fernandez³  Eric Lacosse⁴  Jonathan R. Polimeni⁴  Philipp Ehses⁵  Jonas Bause⁶  Ali Aghaeifar⁶  Rolf Pohmann⁷  Klaus Scheffler⁸ 

[1] Corresponding author. Max-Planck-Ring 11, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany.;Graduate School of Neuronal and Behavioral Sciences, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany;Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;High-Field Magnetic Resonance Center, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany;Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charleston, MA, USA;Department for Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Imaging, University Hospital Tuebingen, Germany;Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA;German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Bonn, Germany;

关键词: Laminar fMRI;    Gradient echo EPI;    Prospective motion correction;    Distortion correction;    Ultra-high field;    Macro-vascular bias;   

DOI  :  

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Functional imaging with sub-millimeter spatial resolution is a basic requirement for assessing functional MRI (fMRI) responses across different cortical depths and is used extensively in the emerging field of laminar fMRI. Such studies seek to investigate the detailed functional organization of the brain and may develop to a new powerful tool for human neuroscience. However, several studies have shown that measurement of laminar fMRI responses can be biased by the image acquisition and data processing strategies. In this work, measurements with three different gradient-echo EPI BOLD fMRI protocols with a voxel size down to 650 ​μm isotropic were performed at 9.4 ​T. We estimated how prospective motion correction can help to improve spatial accuracy by reducing the number of spatial resampling steps in postprocessing. In addition, we demonstrate key requirements for accurate geometric distortion correction to ensure that distortion correction maps are properly aligned to the functional data and that strong variations of distortions near large veins can lead to signal overlays which cannot be corrected for during postprocessing. Furthermore, this study illustrates the spatial extent of bias induced by pial and other larger veins in laminar BOLD experiments. Since these issues under investigation affect studies performed with more conventional spatial resolutions, the methods applied in this work may also help to improve the understanding of the BOLD signal more broadly.

【 授权许可】

Unknown