Effects of stimulus rate on the auditory cortex using fMRI with ‘sparse’ temporal sampling

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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the auditory stimulus presentation rate on signal response during fMRI with a minimal effect of scanner acoustic noise. Six subjects received auditory stimulus with a pure tone (1000 Hz, 30 ms duration) at presentation rates of 0.5, 2, 5, 10 and 20 Hz. Echo planar images were obtained with a long TR of 12 s and clustered multi-slice acquisition. The number of activated pixels and percentage signal change were measured in the transverse temporal gyri, which revealed that these values at 5 Hz were significantly greater than those at 0.5 Hz and at 20 Hz.