Fat-suppressed alternating-SSFP for whole-brain fMRI using breath-hold and visual stimulus paradigms.

Purpose: To achieve artifact-suppressed whole-brain pass-band-balanced steady-state free precession functional MRI from a single functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.

Methods: A complete and practical data acquisition sequence for alt-SSFP fMRI was developed. First, multishot flyback-echo-planar imaging (EPI) and echo-time shifting were used to achieve data acquisition that was robust against eddy currents, gradient delays, and ghosting artifacts. Second, a steady-state catalyzation scheme was implemented to reduce oscillations in the transient signal when catalyzing in and out of alternate steady states. Next, a short spatial-spectral radiofrequency (RF) pulse was designed to achieve excellent fat-suppression while maintaining a repetition time <15 ms to sensitize functional activation toward smaller vessels and capillaries. Lastly, parallel imaging was used to achieve whole-brain coverage and sufficiently high temporal resolution.

Results: Breath-hold experiments showed excellent fat-suppression and alt-SSFP's capability to recover functional sensitivity from signal dropout regions of conventional gradient-echo and banding artifacts from conventional pass-band-balanced steady-state free precession. Applying fat-suppression resulted in improved activation maps and increased temporal SNR. Visual stimulus functional studies verify the proposed method's excellent functional sensitivity to neuronal activation.

Conclusion: Artifact-suppressed images are demonstrated, showing a practical pass-band-balanced steady-state free precession fMRI method that permits whole-brain imaging with excellent blood oxygen level-dependent sensitivity and fat suppression.