7T fMRI in the Cervical Spinal Cord Under Noxious Thermal Stimulation

FMRI of the spinal cord is challenging due to its small size, necessitating high resolution. Increasing B0 to 7T enables higher spatial resolution, and also enhances BOLD signal. However, challenges related to B0 homogeneity complicate spinal cord fMRI at 7T. We present group-level stimulus task fMRI results in the spinal cord at 7T, and compare the performance of single-shot and multi-shot 2D EPI protocols. Single-shot at 0.75mm in-plane resolution was most sensitive to activation, while multi-shot at 0.60mm provided the best-localized clusters. The best choice of protocol depends on the importance of sensitivity versus spatial localization for a given experiment.