Characterisation of laminar and vascular spatiotemporal dynamics of CBV and BOLD signals using VASO and ME-GRE at 7T in humans

Interpretation of cortical laminar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity requires detailed knowledge of the spatiotemporal haemodynamic response across vascular compartments due to the well-known vascular biases (e.g., the draining veins). Further complications arise from the fact that the spatiotemporal haemodynamic response differs depending on the duration of stimulation. Information about haemodynamic response characteristics across different stimulus durations, cortical depth, and vascular compartments is crucial for future studies using depth-dependent cerebral blood volume (CBV) measurements, which promise higher specificity for the cortical microvasculature than the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast. To date, direct information about CBV dynamics with respect to stimulus duration, cortical depth, and vasculature is missing in humans. Therefore, we characterised the cortical depth-dependent CBV-haemodynamic responses across a wide set of stimulus durations with 0.9 mm isotropic spatial and 0.785 seconds effective temporal resolution in humans using slice-selective slab-inversion vascular space occupancy (SS-SI VASO). Additionally, we investigated signal contributions from macrovascular compartments using fine-scale vascular information from multi-echo gradient-echo (ME-GRE) data at 0.35 mm isotropic resolution. In total, this resulted in (Formula presented.) 7.5 hours of scanning per participant (n = 5). We have three major findings: (I) While we could demonstrate that 1 second stimulation is viable using VASO, more than 12 seconds stimulation provides better CBV responses in terms of specificity to the microvasculature, but durations beyond 24 seconds of stimulation may be wasteful for certain applications. (II) We observed that CBV responses were slightly delayed for superficial compared deeper layers for stimuli (Formula presented.) 4 seconds. (III) While we found increasingly strong BOLD signal responses in vessel-dominated voxels with longer stimulation durations, we found increasingly strong CBV signal responses in vessel-dominated voxels only until 4 second stimulation durations. After 4 seconds, only the signal from non-vessel-dominated voxels kept increasing. This might explain why CBV responses are more specific to the underlying neuronal activity for long stimulus durations.