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Abstract

Functional neuroimaging in the human brain using non-invasive magnetic resonance methods has the potential of providing highly resolved maps of neuronal activation. Decreasing the voxel size and obtaining simultaneously high temporal resolution is a major challenge and is mainly limited by sensitivity. Here, signal-to-noise gains at high magnetic fields (7 Tesla) and an optimized surface coil setup are combined with a novel approach for zoomed functional imaging in the visual cortex. For echo-planar imaging, the acquisition time and segmentation was shortened fourfold by using a reduced field-of-view. An adiabatic outer-volume suppression method, BISTRO, was used to obliterate signal outside the area-of-interest achieving effective suppression even for inhomogeneous B1-fields. A single-shot acquisition was performed at sub-millimeter resolution in the human brain, while simultaneously maintaining a high temporal resolution of 125 ms. Functional studies with and without field-of-view reduction were performed. Activation and percent change maps were compared with respect to spatial extent, t-values and percent changes of the BOLD contrast. The detection of functional activation was found to be equal within the inter-series variability for the two acquisition schemes. Thus, single-trial BOLD responses were detected for the first time robustly at a 500 x 500 µm2 in plane and 250 ms temporal resolution, significantly expanding the possibilities of event-related functional imaging in the human brain. The magnetization transfer effect induced by the outer-volume suppression pulses was investigated and found to be increased during neuronal activity.