Schrödinger Diffusion Driven Signal Recovery in 3T BOLD fMRI Using Unmatched 7T Observations

Ultra-high-field (7 Tesla) BOLD fMRI offers exceptional detail in both spatial and temporal domains, along with robust signal-to-noise characteristics, making it a powerful modality for studying visual information processing in the brain. However, due to the limited accessibility of 7T scanners, the majority of neuroimaging studies are still conducted using 3T systems, which inherently suffer from reduced fidelity in both resolution and SNR. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce a new computational approach designed to enhance the quality of 3T BOLD fMRI acquisitions. Specifically, we project both 3T and 7T datasets, sourced from different individuals and experimental setups, into a shared low-dimensional representation space. Within this space, we employ a lightweight, unsupervised Schrödinger Bridge framework to infer a high-SNR, high-resolution counterpart of the 3T data, without relying on paired supervision. This methodology is evaluated across multiple fMRI retinotopy datasets, including synthetically generated samples, and demonstrates a marked improvement in the reliability and fit of population receptive field (pRF) models applied to the enhanced 3T outputs. Our findings suggest that it is feasible to computationally approximate 7T-level quality from standard 3T acquisitions.

@article{xiong2025_2504.01004,
  title={ Schrödinger Diffusion Driven Signal Recovery in 3T BOLD fMRI Using Unmatched 7T Observations },
  author={ Yujian Xiong and Xuanzhao Dong and Sebastian Waz and Wenhui Zhu and Negar Mallak and Zhong-lin Lu and Yalin Wang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.01004},
  year={ 2025 }
}