The development of ultra high field (UHF) fMRI has led to the possibility of imaging the brain at increasingly higher resolutions. Gradient-echo blood oxygen level dependent (GE-BOLD) imaging is the conventional approach for submillimeter functional studies at UHF, despite its reduced specificity due to its susceptibility to both the micro- and the macrovasculature. For investigations of cortical regions other than the auditory cortex, a contrast mechanism based on measuring differences in cerebral blood volume (CBV), named vascular space occupancy (VASO), has been shown to be less influenced by the macrovasculature. This dataset includes functional MRI time series of both GE-BOLD and VASO used to test a VASO imaging protocol for auditory neuroscientific applications.

The dataset includes 3 studies: Study 1 (N=4 volunteers) includes data used to test solutions to account for physiological noise induced artifacts when collecting VASO data. In each folder within this study we report: - Anatomical images (MP2RAGE) (if collected - S2 and S3 are the same subject) - Functional images (BOLD and VASO; for S3 only BOLD) (niftis created from Dicoms - without processing). - Protocol files indicating when which condition was presented (for S2, S3 and S4) --> these file endings can be opened in BrainVoyager or they can be opened with any text editor and are coded in volumes.

Study 2 (N=5 volunteers) includes data used to test a final VASO protocol but with two different methods for readout (3D vs 2D echo planar imaging - for four volunteers). In each folder within this study we report: - Functional data (BOLD and VASO - without processing) sorted in a 2D and 3D folder (niftis created from Dicoms). - Mean bias field corrected images for each respective readout and contrast --> coming from processed images, used in figure 2 as underlay (can be used as anatomical data for overlay of functional activation maps). - Activation maps in z-scores.

For S5 (reproducibility), we collected one long session of 12 runs in one volunteer to assess the reproducibility of our 3D acquisition. In this folder we added: - Functional data without processing for all 12 runs. - Mean bias field corrected image of VASO. - Clustered activation maps of VASO for both splits of the data.

Study 3 (N=2 volunteers) provides a proof of concept of the use of the final VASO protocol. In each folder within this study we report: - Functional runs (BOLD and VASO; niftis created from Dicoms - without processing). - Skull-stripped anatomical MP2RAGE images -Protocol files indicating when which condition was presented --> these file endings can be opened in BrainVoyager or they can be opened with any text editor and are coded in volumes.