1. Advantages of short repetition time resting-state functional MRI enabled by simultaneous multi-slice imaging.
- Author
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Jahanian H, Holdsworth S, Christen T, Wu H, Zhu K, Kerr AB, Middione MJ, Dougherty RF, Moseley M, and Zaharchuk G
- Subjects
- Adult, Brain anatomy & histology, Brain physiology, Brain Mapping instrumentation, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Middle Aged, Reproducibility of Results, Signal-To-Noise Ratio, Brain diagnostic imaging, Brain Mapping methods, Echo-Planar Imaging, Magnetic Resonance Imaging
- Abstract
Background: Recent advancements in simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging techniques have enabled whole-brain resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) scanning at sub-second temporal resolution, providing spectral ranges much wider than the typically used range of 0.01-0.1 Hz. However, the advantages of this accelerated acquisition for rs-fMRI have not been evaluated., New Method: In this study, we used SMS Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) to probe whole-brain functional connectivity with a short repetition time (TR = 350 ms) and compared it with standard EPI with a longer TR of 2000 ms. We determined the effect of scan length and investigated the temporal filtration strategies that optimize results based on metrics of signal-noise separation and test-retest reliability using both seed-based and independent component analysis (ICA)., Results: We found that use of either the entire frequency range of 0.01-1.4 Hz or the entire frequency range with the exclusion of typical cardiac and respiratory frequency values tended to provide the best functional connectivity maps., Comparison With Existing Methods: We found that the SMS-acquired rs-fMRI scans had improved the signal-noise separation, while preserving the same level of test-retest reliability compared to conventional EPI, and enabled the detection of reliable functional connectivity networks with scan times as short as 3 min., Conclusions: Our findings suggest that whole-brain rs-fMRI studies may benefit from the increased temporal resolution enabled by the SMS-EPI acquisition, leading to drastic scan time reductions, which in turn should enable the more widespread use of rs-fMRI in clinical research protocols., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
- Published
- 2019
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