Wholebody somatotopic maps in the cerebellum revealed with 7T fMRI Abstract   The cerebellum is known to contain a double somatotopic body representation. While the anterior lobe body map has shown a robust somatotopic organization in previous fMRI studies, the representations in the posterior lobe have been more difficult to observe and are less precisely characterized. In this study, participants went through a simple motor task asking them to move either the eyes (leftright guided saccades), tongue (leftright movement), thumbs, little fingers or toes (flexion). Using high spatial resolution fMRI data acquired at ultrahigh field (7T), with special care taken to obtain sufficient B1 over the entire cerebellum and a cerebellar surface reconstruction facilitating visual inspection of the results, we were able to precisely map the somatotopic representations of these five distal body parts on both subject and groupspecific cerebellar surfaces. The anterior lobe (including lobule VI) showed a consistent and robust somatotopic gradient. Although less robust, the presence of such a gradient in the posterior lobe, from Crus II to lobule VIIIb, was also observed. Additionally, the eyes were also strongly represented in Crus I and the oculomotor vermis. Overall, crosstalk between the different body part representations was negligible. Taken together, these results show that multiple representations of distal body parts are present in the cerebellum, across many lobules, and they are organized in an orderly manner.

Reproducibility of amygdala activation in facial emotion processing at 7T Abstract   Despite its importance as the prime method for noninvasive assessment of human brain function, functional MRI (fMRI) was repeatedly challenged with regards to the validity of the fMRIderived brain activation maps. Amygdala fMRI was particularly targeted, as the amygdalau0027s anatomical position in the ventral brain combined with strong magnetic field inhomogeneities and proximity to large vessels pose considerable obstacles for robust activation mapping.  In this highresolution study performed at ultrahigh field (7T) fMRI, we aimed at (1) investigating systematic replicability of amygdala grouplevel activation in response to an established emotion processing task by varying task instruction and acquisition parameters and (2) testing for intra and intersession reliability.  At grouplevel, our results show statistically significant activation in bilateral amygdala and fusiform gyrus for each of the runs acquired. In addition, while fusiform gyrus activations are consistent across runs and sessions, amygdala activation levels show habituation effects across runs. This amygdala habituation effect is replicated in a session repeated two weeks later. Varying task instruction between matching emotions and matching persons does not change amygdala activation strength. Also, comparing two acquisition protocols with repetition times of either 700xe2x80xafms or 1400xe2x80xafms did not result in statistically significant differences of activation levels.  Regarding withinsubject reliability of amygdala activation, despite considerable variance in individual habituation patterns, we report fair to good intersession reliability for the first run and excellent reliability for averages over runs.  We conclude that highresolution fMRI at 7T allows for robust mapping of amygdala activation in a broad range of variations. Our results of amygdala 7T fMRI are suitable to inform methodology and may encourage future studies to continue using emotion discrimination paradigms in clinical and nonclinical applications.