Abstract
The tonotopic representations within the primary auditory cortex (PAC) have been successfully mapped with ultra-high field fMRI. Here, we compared the reliability of this tonotopic mapping paradigm at 7 T with 1.5 mm spatial resolution with maps acquired at 3 T with the same stimulation paradigm, but with spatial resolutions of 1.8 and 2.4 mm. For all subjects, the mirror-symmetric gradients within PAC were highly similar at 7 T and 3 T and across renderings at different spatial resolutions; albeit with lower percent signal changes at 3 T. In contrast, the frequency maps outside PAC tended to suffer from a reduced BOLD contrast-to-noise ratio at 3 T for a 1.8 mm voxel size, while robust at 2.4 mm and at 1.5 mm at 7 T. Overall, our results showed the robustness of the phase-encoding paradigm used here to map tonotopic representations across scanners.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation Grant 320030B-141177 to S.C. We thank Eleonora Fornari, Giovanni Battistella and Jean-François Knebel for their help with 3 T acquisitions and statistics.
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Da Costa, S., Saenz, M., Clarke, S. et al. Tonotopic Gradients in Human Primary Auditory Cortex: Concurring Evidence From High-Resolution 7 T and 3 T fMRI. Brain Topogr 28, 66–69 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-014-0388-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-014-0388-0