Impact of acquisition and analysis strategies on cortical depth-dependent fMRI

Functional MRI at ultra-high magnetic fields (≥ 7 T) provides the opportunity to probe columnar and laminar processing in the human brain in vivo at sub-millimeter spatial scales. However, fMRI data only indirectly reflects the neuronal laminar profile due to a bias to ascending and pial veins inherent in gradient- and spin-echo BOLD fMRI. In addition, accurate delineation of the cortical depths is difficult, due to the relatively large voxel...