MRI acquisition
Participants in the UKB imaging study were scanned in one of four imaging assessment centers in Cheadle, Reading, Newcastle upon Tyne, or Bristol. Data collection in Bristol started later and has only processed a small number of participants so far. All locations use identical 3T Siemens MAGNETOM Skyra scanners with a standard Siemens 32-channel head coil (Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Erlangen, Germany)1. A single MRI scan takes 31 minutes (excluding shimming) and consists of a T1, rs-fMRI, task fMRI, T2 FLAIR, diffusion MRI, and SWI sequence. In this project we focused on the rs-fMRI images.
The duration for a single rs-fMRI is 6.10 minutes. In total 490 images were taken with a gradient-echo EPI sequence with x8 multiband acceleration with a TR of 735 ms, an TE of 39 ms, FOV of 88 x 88 x 64 matrix, FA of 52°, and a voxel size of 2.4 x 2.4 x 2.4 mm. During preprocessing, the fMRI images were registered to the T1 images which were acquired using an approximately 5min MPRAGE sequence with iPAT of 2, TR of 2000 ms, voxel size of 1 mm3, and FOV of 208 x 256 x 256 matrix2.