Simultaneous multi-slice inverse imaging of the human brain

Sci Rep. 2017 Dec 5;7(1):17019. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-16976-0.

Abstract

Ultrafast functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can measure blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals with high sensitivity and specificity. Here we propose a novel method: simultaneous multi-slice inverse imaging (SMS-InI) - a combination of simultaneous multi-slice excitation, simultaneous echo refocusing (SER), blipped controlled aliasing in parallel imaging echo-planar imaging (EPI), and regularized image reconstruction. Using a 32-channel head coil array on a 3 T scanner, SMS-InI achieves nominal isotropic 5-mm spatial resolution and 10 Hz sampling rate at the whole-brain level. Compared with traditional inverse imaging, we found that SMS-InI has higher spatial resolution with lower signal leakage and higher time-domain signal-to-noise ratio with the optimized regularization parameter in the reconstruction. SMS-InI achieved higher effective resolution and higher detection power in detecting visual cortex activity than InI. SMS-InI also detected subcortical fMRI signals with the similar sensitivity and localization accuracy like EPI. The spatiotemporal resolution of SMS-InI was used to reveal that presenting visual stimuli with 0.2 s latency between left and right visual hemifield led to 0.2 s relative hemodynamic response latency between the left and right visual cortices. Together, these results indicate that SMS-InI is a useful tool in measuring cortical and subcortical hemodynamic responses with high spatiotemporal resolution.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Brain / anatomy & histology*
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Brain Mapping / methods*
  • Echo-Planar Imaging / methods*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • ROC Curve
  • Signal-To-Noise Ratio