Meeting minutes of the virtual layer-fMRI event #1

On May 7th 2020, there was a virtual layerfMRI event to discuss current issues in the field.

This meeting was held as a replacement of an originally planned layer-fMRI dinner at ISMRM and happened in succession of an earlier in-person layerfMRI workshop in November 2019 (meeting minutes here).

Below you find the important links of the the virtual event, videos of the talks and discussions, and a summary of the hot topics that were discussed.

• The meeting was organized by Luca Vizioli and Renzo Huber. And it was supported by CMRR (Essa Yacoub and Kamil Ugurbil) as well as the Maastricht-York partnership grant (PIs: Aneurin Kennerley and Renzo Huber).
• There were 149 participants + 4 speaker!
• The layerfMRI slack-channel of the network has been opened to everyone and can be joined here: https://tinyurl.com/cdrfmri1.
• The content of the next meeting will be determined by results of the survey here: https://layerfmri.page.link/meeting_survey. The meeting is scheduled for early July as of May 8th, it looks like most people prefer to talk about analysis challenges.

Hot topics that were discussed

• How do we estimate sensitivity and specificity of a sequence?
• Validations that layer-specific fMRI signals are explainable by electrophysiology are necessary.
• How important is it to consider arterial artifacts for layer-fMRI signal interpretation?
• How are inflow effects considered in different layer-fMRI readout schemes?
• Can maps of physiological noise be helpful for segmentation and/or registration?
• What do maps of non-gaussian noise represent?
• The major limitation of layer-fMRI is still the resolution! Can we go to smaller voxels? How?
• How can we make use to layer-fMRI in non-primary areas? And how applicable is it?
• How can we make use of layer-fMRI in pathology? E.g. vascular diseases.
• The combination of experimental setup and acquisition contrast is important.
• Layer-fMRI is depth-dependent fMRI.

Talks and Discussion of the virtual event

All slides can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3874364

Next meeting

The next virtual layer conference will tentatively be on September 28th (Europe and America) and September 29th (in Asia) on the topic on layer-fMRI vs. electrophysiology. with speakers including Kamil Ugurbil and Seong-Gi Kim.