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Ultrafast fMRI Detects Age-Related Changes in Harmonics of Cardiac Pulsations in the Brain at 7 T.

Overview

Authors: Charles Marchini1,2, Dema Abdelkarim1, Yuhui Chai1,3, Monica Fabiani1,4,5, Gabriele Gratton1,4,5, Bradley P. Sutton1,2,3,4,6
ORCID iDs: Charles Marchini, Bradley P. Sutton
  1. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Urbana Illinois USA
  2. Grainger College of Engineering, Bioengineering Department University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Urbana Illinois USA
  3. Carle Illinois Advanced Imaging Center Carle Hospital and University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Urbana Illinois USA
  4. Neuroscience Program, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Urbana Illinois USA
  5. Department of Psychology University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Champaign Illinois USA
  6. Carle Illinois College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Urbana Illinois USA
Institutions: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (United States)
Journal: Magnetic resonance in medicine, volume 96, issue 3, pages 1206-1218
Dates: received 27 October 2025; accepted 1 May 2026; published online 10 May 2026; in print September 2026
Type: Research article · Language: English
License: CC BY
Identifiers: DOI 10.1002/mrm.70429 · PMID 42108754 · PMCID PMC13327429 · OpenAlex W7160844131
Open access: hybrid, a free copy (OpenAlex)
Status: code on request
Categories: fMRI (modality), human (organism), stroke (population), methods / tools (subfield)
Methods: Spectral & time-frequency, Connectivity, Statistics, Preprocessing, fMRI & imaging
Keywords: 7 Tesla, aging, arterial stiffening, BOLD fMRI, cerebrovascular pulsatility, partial separability
MeSH: Aging*, Brain*, Heart*, Magnetic Resonance Imaging*, Adult, Aged, Female, Heart Rate, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Male, Middle Aged, Plethysmography, Pulsatile Flow, Reproducibility of Results, Young Adult (* major topic)
Journal subjects: Imaging Methodology
Topic: Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications (Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging, Medicine), according to OpenAlex
Funding: Beckman Institute Biomedical Imaging Center; National Institute on Aging (R01AG059878, RF1AG062666)
Citations: not cited yet (Europe PMC); 61 references in the paper

Abstract

Purpose: Aging impacts pulsatility of blood vessels in the brain, reflecting vascular health. Resolving characteristics of cardiac pulsatility requires faster acquisitions than traditional fMRI. An ultrafast fMRI method was developed and applied to sample several harmonics of cardiac pulsations at 7 T.

Methods: Leveraging partial separability, an ultrafast fMRI method (TR = 65 ms) was applied at 7 T with full brain coverage at 2 mm isotropic resolution and concurrent pulse plethysmographic (PPG) recordings in 28 healthy adults, 22 of whom had acceptable PPG and MRI data. The reliability of the pulsation was assessed for each voxel through even/odd splitting of heartbeats. The PPG was used to retrospectively temporally align signals across heartbeats, and analysis was performed on amplitudes of harmonic frequencies to explore age‐ and sex‐related differences. Reliable measures of four harmonics of the heartbeat were characterized along with the ratios of the harmonics to the primary harmonic.

Results: High reliability of the pulsation was found near major arteries, tested by Spearman correlation between the first harmonic and a vessel atlas (p < 0.0001). Consistent with previous literature, older adults exhibited higher harmonic amplitudes with the strongest result in the second harmonic in gray matter with FDR‐corrected q = 0.020. In addition, males had a higher third‐to‐first harmonic ratio.

Conclusion: Ultrafast fMRI can reliably resolve several harmonics of cardiac pulsations in the brain in and around blood vessels. This may provide a way to characterize vascular health throughout the brain during aging.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper says that its authors' code is available on request: it was not published with the paper, so there is nothing to verify.

The paper's code and data availability statement is in the Data section.

Tracing map

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Data

No dataset and no data link were found in the paper.

Data Availability Statement

Data and code for the current study are available from the corresponding author (B.P.S.) upon reasonable request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

The history of this record: each version stored by the harvester or made by a correction of its authors or of the maintainers of its code, and what changed in its facts. The texts of the paper (its abstract, its availability statements) are not part of it; versions that changed only those are not listed.

Version 2, 28 September 2026

  • Publisher: — → Wiley

Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 6 authors, 6 keywords, 16 MeSH terms, 2 funders, 60 references.

Cite

This paper

Marchini, C., Abdelkarim, D., Chai, Y., Fabiani, M., Gratton, G., & Sutton, B. P. (2026). Ultrafast fMRI Detects Age-Related Changes in Harmonics of Cardiac Pulsations in the Brain at 7 T. Magnetic resonance in medicine, 96(3), 1206-1218. https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.70429

BibTeX

@article{marchini2026ultrafast,
author = {Marchini, Charles and Abdelkarim, Dema and Chai, Yuhui and Fabiani, Monica and Gratton, Gabriele and Sutton, Bradley P.},
title = {{Ultrafast fMRI Detects Age-Related Changes in Harmonics of Cardiac Pulsations in the Brain at 7 T}},
journal = {Magnetic resonance in medicine},
year = {2026},
month = may,
volume = {96},
number = {3},
pages = {1206--1218},
publisher = {Wiley},
issn = {0740-3194},
doi = {10.1002/mrm.70429},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.70429},
pmid = {42108754},
pmcid = {PMC13327429}
}

RIS

TY - JOUR
AU - Marchini, Charles
AU - Abdelkarim, Dema
AU - Chai, Yuhui
AU - Fabiani, Monica
AU - Gratton, Gabriele
AU - Sutton, Bradley P.
TI - Ultrafast fMRI Detects Age-Related Changes in Harmonics of Cardiac Pulsations in the Brain at 7 T
T2 - Magnetic resonance in medicine
J2 - Magn Reson Med
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/10
VL - 96
IS - 3
SP - 1206
EP - 1218
SN - 0740-3194
PB - Wiley
DO - 10.1002/mrm.70429
UR - https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.70429
LA - en
ER -

CSL-JSON

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