Clinical fMRI: Evidence for a 7 T benefit over 3 T

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 57; no. 3; pp. 1015 - 1021
• Main Authors: Beisteiner, R, Robinson, S, Wurnig, M, Hilbert, M, Merksa, K, Rath, J, Hoellinger, I, Klinger, N, Marosi, Ch, Trattnig, S, Geissler, A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Academic Press 01.08.2011
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.010

Despite there being an increasing number of installations of ultra high field MR systems ( 3 T) in clinical environments, no functional patient investigations have yet examined possible benefits for functional diagnostics. Here we performed presurgical localization of the primary motor hand area on 3 T and 7 T Siemens scanners with identical investigational procedures and comparable system specific sequence optimizations. Results from 17 patients showed significantly higher functional sensitivity of the 7 T system measured via percent signal change, mean t-values, number of suprathreshold voxels and contrast to noise ratio. On the other hand, 7 T data suffered from a significant increase of artifacts (ghosting, head motion). We conclude that ultra high field systems provide a clinically relevant increase of functional sensitivity for patient investigations.