Impressively rapid follow-ups to a published fMRI study
Alternative post title: Why blogs can be seriously useful in research.Last week there was quite a lot of attention to an article published in PNAS by Aharoni et al. In their study they claimed that...
View ArticleResting state fMRI confounds
(Thanks to Dave J. Hayes for tweeting the publication of these papers.)Two new papers provide comprehensive reviews of some of the confounds to the acquisition, processing and interpretation of resting...
View ArticleMultiband (aka simultaneous multislice) EPI validation in progress!
I am pleased to see a couple of presentations at next week's ISMRM conference in Salt Lake City dealing with some of the important validation steps that should be performed before multiband (MB) EPI...
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Physics for understanding fMRI artifacts: Part Fourteen
Partial Fourier EPI(The full contents for the PFUFA series of posts is here.)In PFUFA Part Twelve you saw how 2D k-space for EPI is achieved in a single shot, i.e. using a repetitive gradient echo...
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12-channel versus 32-channel head coils for fMRI
At last month's Human Brain Mapping conference in Seattle, a poster by Harvard scientists Stephanie McMains and Ross Mair (poster 3412) showed yet more evidence that the benefits of a 32-channel coil...
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Shared MB-EPI data
This is cool, publicly available test-retest pilot data sets using MB-EPI and conventional EPI on the same subjects courtesy of Nathan Kline Institute:Multiband Imaging Test-Retest Pilot DatasetWhat's...
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The experimental consequences of using partial Fourier for EPI
PFUFA Part Fourteen introduced the idea of acquiring partial k-space and explained how the method, hereafter referred to as partial Fourier (pF), is typically used for EPI acquisitions. At this point...
View Articlei-fMRI: BRAIN scanners of the past, present and future
Have you ever wondered why your fMRI scanner is the way it is? Why, for example, is the magnet typically operated at 1.5 or 3 T, and why is there a body-sized transmission coil for the RF? The prosaic...
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CALAMARI: Doing MRI at 130 microtesla with a SQUID
I've been dabbling in some ultralow field (ULF) MRI over the past several years, trying first to get functional brain imaging to work (more on that another day, perhaps) and more recently looking at...
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Using partial Fourier EPI for fMRI
Back in August I did a post on the experimental consequences of using partial Fourier for EPI. (An earlier post, PFUFA Part Fourteen introduces partial Fourier EPI.) The main point of that post was to...
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Partial Fourier versus GRAPPA for increasing EPI slice coverage
This is the final post in a short series concerning partial Fourier EPI for fMRI. The previous post showed how partial Fourier phase encoding can accelerate the slice acquisition rate for EPI. It is...
View ArticleUsing someone else's data
There was quite a lot of activity yesterday in response to PLOS ONE's announcement regarding its data policy. Most of the discussion I saw concerned rights of use and credit, completeness of data (e.g....
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WARNING! Stimulation threshold exceeded!
When running fMRI experiments it's not uncommon for the scanner to prohibit what you'd like to do because of a gradient stimulation limit. You may even hit the limit "out of the blue," e.g. when...
View Articlei-fMRI: A virtual whiteboard discussion on multi-echo, simultaneous...
Disclaimer: This isn't an April Fool!I'd like to use the collective wisdom of the Internet to discuss the pros and cons of a general approach to simultaneous multislice (SMS) EPI that I've been...
View ArticleSharing data: a better way to go?
On Tuesday I became involved in a discussion about data sharing with JB Poline and Matthew Brett. Two days later the issue came up again, this time on Twitter. In both discussions I heard a lot of...
View ArticleQA for fMRI, Part 1: An outline of the goals
For such a short abbreviation QA sure is a huge, lumbering beast of a topic. Even the definition is complicated! It turns out that many people, myself included, invoke one term when they may mean...
View ArticleQA for fMRI, Part 2: User QA
MotivationThe majority of "scanner issues" are created by routine operation, most likely through error or omission. In a busy center with harried scientists who are invariably running late there is a...
View ArticleFree online fMRI education!
UCLA has their excellent summer Neuroimaging Training Program (NITP) going on as I type. Most talks are streamed live, or you can watch the videos at your leisure. Slides may also be available. Check...
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QA for fMRI, Part 3: Facility QA - what to measure, when, and why
As I mentioned in the introductory post to this series, Facility QA is likely what most people think of whenever QA is mentioned in an fMRI context. In short, it's the tests that you expect your...
View Articlei-fMRI: My initial thoughts on the BRAIN Initiative proposals
So we finally have some grant awards on which to judge the BRAIN Initiative. What was previously a rather vague outline of some distant, utopian future can now be scrutinized for novelty, practicality,...
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