The patients underwent three fMRI sessions at different time points on a 3 T MRI scanner (ACHIEVA, Philips Medical Systems, Best, The Netherlands). Alcohol addicted patients performed a visual cue stimulation experiment using a blocked designed paradigm. During the experiment, the fMRI was performed to map out BOLD signals in different cortical areas. Each patient had four sessions and each session contained 120 scans (EPI; 120 dynamic scans, repetition time (TR) = 3000 ms; echo time (TE) = 33 ms; voxel size = 2.9 × 2.9 × 4.0 mm; field of view (FOV) = 230 × 230 mm; flip angle (FA) = 90). Within and between sessions balance was included in the experimental design. In each session, 120 images were divided into 24 blocks and 4 conditions. Each block contained 5 images within the same condition and each image lasted 3 s. The four conditions were (a) alcohol condition (images of alcohol beverages), (b) beverage condition (images of non-alcoholic beverages), (c) control condition (unidentifiably scrambled images of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages), and (d) fix condition (image of a fixation cross).
