Multiband Accelerated fMRI Acquisition

A Siemens Magnetom Trio 3T whole body MRI scanner and a thirty-two-channel head coil were used. Multi-band accelerated echo planar imaging sequencing (Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Minnesota) was used with an acceleration factor of 6 and iPAT acceleration factor of 2. T2*-weighted EPI slices were obtained every 0.7 s (TR = 0.7, TE = 0.03), these parameters were optimised given our scanner capability and used to increase sampling rates and increase our power to detect resting state networks as has been shown previously with multiband (Xu et al., 2013 (link), Filippini et al., 2014 (link)). 54 transverse slices with in-plane resolution of 2.4 × 2.4 mm were attained and slice thickness was 2.4 mm. The matrix size was 96 × 96 and the field of view (FOV) were 230 × 230 mm. Acquisition was performed during resting-state scan, yielding 400 vol in total. Sagittal 3D MPRAGE images were also acquired with an isotropic in-plane resolution of 1 × 1 × 1 (TI = 0.9 s, TR = 2.02, flip angle 9°, FOV = 250 × 250 mm) yielding 192 slices.