Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2011 Jan 1;54(1):337-43. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.08.029. Epub 2010 Aug 20.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in auditory experiments is a challenge, because the scanning procedure produces considerable noise that can interfere with the auditory paradigm. The noise might either mask the auditory material presented, or interfere with stimuli designed to evoke emotions because it sounds loud and rather unpleasant. Therefore, scanning paradigms that allow interleaved auditory stimulation and image acquisition appear to be advantageous. The sparse temporal sampling (STS) technique uses a very long repetition time in order to achieve a stimulus presentation in the absence of scanner noise. Although only relatively few volumes are acquired for the resulting data sets, there have been recent studies where this method has furthered remarkable results. A new development is the interleaved silent steady state (ISSS) technique. Compared with STS, this method is capable of acquiring several volumes in the time frame between the auditory trials (while the magnetization is kept in a steady state during stimulus presentation). In order to draw conclusions about the optimum fMRI procedure with auditory stimulation, different echo-planar imaging (EPI) acquisition schemes were compared: Continuous scanning, STS, and ISSS. The total acquisition time of each sequence was adjusted to about 12.5 min. The results indicate that the ISSS approach exhibits the highest sensitivity in detecting subtle activity in sub-cortical brain regions.
功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）在听觉实验中是一个挑战，因为扫描过程会产生相当大的噪声，可能会干扰听觉范式。这些噪声可能会掩盖呈现的听觉材料，或者干扰旨在引发情感的刺激，因为它们听起来响亮而相当不愉快。因此，允许交错听觉刺激和图像采集的扫描范式似乎具有优势。稀疏时间采样（STS）技术使用非常长的重复时间来实现无扫描器噪声的刺激呈现。尽管对于由此产生的数据集仅采集了相对较少的体积，但最近已经有研究使用这种方法取得了显著的结果。一种新的发展是交错静默稳态（ISSS）技术。与 STS 相比，该方法能够在听觉试验之间的时间框架内采集多个体积（而在刺激呈现期间保持磁化处于稳态）。为了得出有关听觉刺激的最佳 fMRI 程序的结论，比较了不同的 echo-planar 成像（EPI）采集方案：连续扫描、STS 和 ISSS。每个序列的总采集时间调整到约 12.5 分钟。结果表明，ISSS 方法在检测皮质下脑区的细微活动方面具有最高的灵敏度。
