Courtesy of Dr Andrew Morgan, this image shows data acquired from a single subject on three 7 tesla (7T) MRI scanner models, for the evaluation of harmonized functional protocols for 7T neuroimaging. Scanning was performed at three sites in the UK7T Network, a platform established with MRC funding to bring together the five UK sites [including Glasgow] with ultra high-field clinical MRI scanners.

Harmonized protocols were developed within the UK7T Network to ensure that comparable high-quality data can be acquired on the scanner models installed at all sites. A multi-centre “travelling-heads” study, involving scanning of the same ten subjects at each site in the network, is being conducted to assess reproducibility and variance in harmonized functional and anatomical 7T neuroimaging protocols. As shown above, comparing data acquired on three different scanner platforms, the fMRI protocols include a motor-visual block task to induce lateralized motor cortex activation (a) and visual cortex activation (b), a motortopy task for high-resolution mapping of cortical representation of the hand (d), and resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) for deriving the default-mode network (DMN) through functional connectivity analysis (e). Both task and resting-state fMRI results show qualitatively similar activation profiles for the same subject across sites, however data quality differences are still evident in temporal SNR (tSNR) maps of scans for the motor-visual block task (c) and the resting-state scans (f).

 

The image is taken from a recent study published in NeuroImage:

Clarke WT, Mougin O, Driver ID, Rua C, Morgan AT, Asghar M, Clare S, Francis S, Wise RG, Rodgers CT, Carpenter A, Muir K, Bowtell R. Multi-site harmonization of 7 tesla MRI neuroimaging protocols. Neuroimage 2020; 206:116335.