At high resolution EPI, the gradients are pushed to their limits and the ramp sampling ratio is particularly large. This means that the ghosting is increased and the Nyquist ghost correction is getting more important. In this post, I describe how to change the Nyquist ghost correction algorithm.
With respect to high-resolution VASO application, visual cortex is very unique. Because of its high demand, the most important pitfalls of SS-SI VASO in visual cortex are discussed below.
In layer-fMRI, we spend so much time and effort to achieve high spatial resolutions and small voxel sizes during the acquisition. However, during the evaluation pipeline much of this spatial resolution can be lost during multiple resampling steps.
In this post, I want to discuss sources of signal blurring during spatial resampling steps and potential strategies to account for them.
Continue reading “Unwanted spatial blurring during resampling”
This blog post discusses the resolution loss when applying partial-Fourier imaging in GE-EPI in the presence of strong T2*-decay.
I found that that when I was aiming for high-resolutions, it is beneficial to refrain from the application of partial Fourier (PF) imaging as much as possible. For the long readout durations at high-resolutions and the fast T2/T2*-decay at high field strengths results in even stronger blurring of partial-Fourier.
Continue reading “Partial-Fourier imaging at High Resolutions”
Smoothing within layers can be advantageous for multiple reasons:
In this post I want to describe the guidelines that helped me to find the right spot of primary motor cortex (M1) that has a double-layer pattern during a conventional finger tapping task.
The motor cortex is an excellent model system to debug-layer fMRI methodology for multiple reasons:
One tricky part, however, is to find the right location of the double layer feature.
This is a step-by-step description on how to obtain layer profiles from any high-resolution fMRI dataset. It is based on manual delineated ROIs and does not require the tricky analysis steps including distortion correction, registration to whole brain “anatomical” datasets, or automatic tissue type segmentation. Hence this is a very quick way for a first glance of the freshly acquired data.
The important steps are: 1.) Upscaling, 2.) Manual delineation of GM, 3.) Calculation of cortical depths in ROI, 4.) Extracting functional data based on calculated cortical depths.
